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In the Guardianship of God
In the Guardianship
of God
BY
FLORA ANNIE STEEL
AUTHOR OF "ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS," "VOICES OF
THE NIGHT," "HOSTS OF THE LORD," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1903
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1908,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up, electrotyped, and published May, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
[The Most Nailing Bad Shot in Creation.]
[Little Henry and his Bearer.]
[Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh.]
[IN THE GUARDIANSHIP OF GOD]
"Dittu Sansi, aged twenty-one, theft, six months," read out the overseer of the gaol, who was introducing a batch of new arrivals to the doctor in charge of a large gaol in the Upper Provinces of India. It was early morning. Outside the high mud walls, which looked like putty and felt like rock, the dew was frosting the grass in the garden where a few favoured criminals were doing the work of oxen for the well-wheel, and turning the runnels of fresh water to the patches of spinach and onion. But here, inside the gaol square, everything had the parched, arid look of sun-baked mud. Not a speck was to be seen anywhere; the very prisoners themselves, standing in a long line awaiting inspection, with their dust-coloured blankets folded upon the ground in front of them, looked like darker clay images waiting to be put on their pedestals. There was a touch of colour, however, close to the arched gateway. First, a red-turbaned warder or two, guarding the wicket; then half-a-dozen constables in yellow trousers, and a deputy-inspector of police smart in silver laces and fringes; finally the gaol darogah, or overseer, a stoutish, good-looking Mahomedan with a tendency to burst out, wherever it was possible, into gay muslin, and decorate the edges of his regulation white raiment with fine stitchings. These, with a nondescript group fresh from the lock-up, were gathered about the plain deal table set in full sunlight where the Doctor sate, ticking off each arrival on the roster. He matched the gaol, being dressed from head to foot in dust-coloured drill, with a wide pith hat which might have been carved out of the putty walls.
"All right, Darogah," he said with a yawn. "Number five hundred and seven. Go on,--what's the matter?"
Shurruf Deen, the Overseer, was looking intently at the paper in his hand, and the rich brown of his complacent face seemed to have faded a little. "Nothing, Huzoor," he replied glibly enough, though a quick observer might have seen the muscles of his brown throat labouring over the syllables. "The list is badly written, in the broken character. Thou shouldst speak to the clerk in thine office, Inspector-jee; this name is almost illegible."
"'Tis Shureef, clear enough, Darogah-jee," dissented the Inspector, huffily; "and I should have thought it fits thine own name too close for--"
"Shureef," read out Shurruf, the Overseer, brusquely, "Shureef, Khoja, thirty-five, lurking house trespass by night, habitual offender, ten years."
The Doctor looked up sharply. Ten years meant business; one can teach a lot in ten years--carpet-weaving, wood-carving, pottery-making--and the Doctor's hobby was his gaol. What he saw was a man, looking many years older than his age, haggard and grey, yet despite this with a lightness and suppleness in every limb. Though this figure was lean where the Overseer was fat, wrinkled where the Overseer showed smooth, there was a similarity in the rich colour of their skins, in the regularity of their features, which made the Englishman turn to look at the Darogah with the mental remark that the race-characteristics of India were very instructive; for Shurruf was a Khoja also. "All right," said the Doctor. "Number five hundred and eight."
"Five hundred and eight," repeated the habitual offender, calmly. "I will not forget. Salaam, Huzoor! Salaam, Darogah-jee!"
"Do you know the man?" asked the Doctor quickly of his subordinate; he was sharp as a needle, and there had been a note in the salutation which he did not understand.
"He was in for two years when I was sub-overseer at Loodhiana, Huzoor," replied Shurruf, imperturbably. "He gave much trouble there; he will not here, since the Doctor-sahib knows how to manage such as he."
Once more there was an undertone, but the Doctor's attention was riveted by the adroit flattery, and he rose to begin his inspection with a smile. It was true; he did know how to manage a gaol, and there could not possibly be any cause for complaint when he was there to apportion each ounce of food scientifically, to rout every germ, every microbe, and treat even contumacy as a disease. The five hundred and odd prisoners were, as it were, the Doctor's chessmen. He marshalled them this way and that, checkmating their vile souls and bodies while they were in his care. If they passed out of it into their own, he took no heed. They might make what they liked of themselves. But if they died, and, as the phrase runs, chose the Guardianship of God, he buried them temporarily in the gaol graveyard with all possible sanitary precautions, against the time when relations or friends might appear to claim the corpse. There was no official regulation as to the limit of time within which such claim could be preferred; but as a dead body remains in the special Guardianship of God for a year, it was an understood thing that man should take over the task before the Almighty gave up the job; it was more satisfactory, especially if the corpse was a Hindu and had to be burned. As for the Doctor, he would have preferred to burn the lot, Hindu and Mahomedan alike; failing that, he--took precautions.
As he walked down the line rapidly his sharp eye noted every detail, and Shurruf Deen had many a swift, probing question to answer. He answered them, however, as swiftly, for he was the best gaoler conceivable; so good that even the Doctor allowed that he was almost capable of managing the gaol himself. A man of unimpeachable character, he had yet a curious insight into the minds of the criminals he guarded, and a singular tact in managing them, so that his record of continual rise in the world seemed likely to lengthen itself by an appointment to the most important gaolership in the Province. Shurruf Deen was working all he knew to secure this, and therefore, as he followed the Doctor, his keen, bold eyes were everywhere forestalling the possibility of blame. They fell, among other things, on Shureef's thin, somewhat bowed figure, as it was marched off to be shaved, washed, manacled, and dressed to pattern. Then they turned almost mechanically to the paper he still held. Shureef Deen, Khoja--ten years' hard--three months' solitary. He gave a faint sigh of relief. Solitary confinement, even when broken up by philanthropy into blocks of a week, gave time. It meant many ameliorations to a prisoner's lot which would be unsafe amid the ruck. Besides no man, he told himself, would be fool enough to risk losing these favours simply to spite another man.
He repeated this thought aloud that same evening, after lights were out, and the silence of solitary cells lay all over the gaol, save in one of the latter, where Shurruf sate whispering to Shureef. In the utter darkness the curious similarity of the place to a wild beast's cage, with its inner grating-barred cubicle and its outer high-walled yard let open to the sky, was lost, and the two men might have been anywhere. Shurruf, however, sate on the millstones, as being more suited to his figure, while Shureef crouched on the ground beside the little heap of corn he was bound to give back ounce for ounce in flour and bran. And as he crouched, leaning listlessly against the wall, his supple hand moved among the wheat raising it idly, and as idly letting it slip back through his thin fingers.
"Fate!" he echoed to something the other said; "nay, 'twas not Fate, brother, which sent me to thy gaol. I was hard pressed; I am growing old for the life; it kills men soon. The police would have had me in the big dacoity case at Delhi despite all; so I bungled one farther north, to come--where thou wast--brother."
"And thou didst right," assented Shurruf, eagerly; "I can make things easy for thee."
The wheat slipped with a soft patter, like rain, through Shureef's fingers. "'Twas not that either which brought me to thy gaol. Listen. I am far through this life, but another begins. I am not going to plead guilty there. It is not guilty there, not guilty on the first count, not guilty as a lad of fifteen for theft--" He paused, then a faint curiosity came to his listlessness and he looked at the half-seen figure beside him--"and such a theft! I--I have not done so mean a one--since--"
Shurruf moved uneasily. "Mayhap not; boys do things men do not. And I have always--yea! thou knowest it--upheld thee better than some think. What then? Thy life is past amendment now, save for tobacco and such like; and these I will give, if thou art wise, for the ten years--"
"I shall not live three months of the ten years, brother," interrupted Shureef, calmly; and at the words a pang of regret that the solitary confinement could not be inflicted straight on end shot through Shurruf's breast, killing the faint remorse the remark had awakened; it would have simplified matters so much to have Shureef safe from the possibility of tale-bearing for those three months. "And, as I said, I want none of these things," went on Shureef; "I only want the truth. Promise to tell it, and I say naught; wilt promise, brother?"
"No!" whispered Shurruf, fiercely. "What good would it do now?"
"It would make some mourn for me; it would make more than cursing follow me; it would be evidence for me, a boy, at the Great Court."
The sleek face beside the anxious one took a strange expression, half joy, half fear. "That is fools' talk. Doth not the Lord know, is He not just?"
"Yes, He knows," persisted Shureef; "but others must know, else they will not claim my body, else my grave will not be cooled with tears. It would not harm thee much, Shurruf. Mayhap 'twould be wiser for thee not to seek advancement, since one, who might hear if the truth were told, seeks it also; but if thou stayest in this fat post--"
"Peace, fool!" interrupted Shurruf, passionately. "I will not. Thou hast no proof, so do thy worst. Thou canst claim me brother if thou wilt, naught else--" Shureef bent forward and whispered a name in his ear, making him start back. "It is not true," he went on rapidly; "he died long since. Think not I do not understand, that I cannot follow thy evil thoughts. Have I not watched thee these twenty years? Have I not seen thee sink, and sink, and sink? Can I not guess thy guile--"
"Because it should have been thine own, Shurruf," interrupted his brother in a new tone. "But let that be. It matters not. I asked this thing of thee that thou mightest do it freely; if not, I take it--for I can take it now. I give thee a fortnight to consider; till then I have no more to say, and thy words will be wasted."
He rose, feeling his way by the wall to the inner cell, and Shurruf, after pausing a moment uncertainly, stole from the outer one, locking the door behind him. There were stronger arguments than words at his command, and he had a fortnight wherein to use them. And use them he did, unsparingly. The week of solitary confinement which followed, and the week of work in the general ward, were alternately hell and comparative heaven; a hell of scant food, work beyond limit, and punishments; a heaven of tobacco, opium, even a nip of country liquor now and then; and, as a foretaste of favours to come, there was a day of work in the gaol-gardens among the cool runnels of water and the spinach-patches. For the Doctor, having small faith in things beyond his ken, was dividing the dead who were in the Guardianship of God, from the living who were in his own; in other words, he was enclosing a new graveyard beyond the garden, and as this involved work in the absolute open air, with greater chance of escape, the good-conduct men from the walled garden were drafted outwards, and their place supplied from within. But neither fifteen lashes, nor the privilege of smoking surreptitiously behind a thicket of jasmine and roses, tempted Shureef from the settled resolve which gave his face a curiously spiritual look. The Doctor called it something else, and in the private list he kept of those in his care, put the name of an incurable disease opposite Shureef's, with this after it: ? three months--and he did not try to teach him carpet-weaving or pottery-making.
The Overseer, however, felt that three months was all too long for him, when, another week of solitary confinement coming round, he slipped over in the dead of night to Shureef's cell, and found him once more fingering the corn idly; but as it was a moonlight night now, he could see the grains of wheat, shining like gold, slip through the lean fingers.
"It is not much I ask, brother," persisted Shureef, almost gently; "only that the home folk may claim my body when I die. That is why I came to thy gaol; for they will not, if the truth be not told, and only thou canst tell it without flaw. True, I can harm thee, but I have no wish for that. See! I give thee yet another week for thought. That is three from three months; but I give no more."
Shurruf Deen went back to his quarters over the big entrance-gate, where the warders waited on him as if he were a prince, and pondered over the dilemma in a white heat of indignation. It was so selfish of Shureef; when God knew, what were a few tears more or less when a man had deliberately cast away his right to wailing a dozen times over? What Shureef had said about the first count was true, but what of the others? What right had he to claim any compensation for that first injustice? What right had he even to claim commiseration for the result of a life he had chosen? Yet the Doctor gave it him; he even ordered him back to the garden after a day or two, with the remark to the native assistant-surgeon that it was a case of the candle of life having been burned at both ends. "He might live a year," he said critically, "but I give him three months; and, of course, he might drop down dead any day."
He might; if he only would before the week was out, thought Shurruf, longingly. It would save so much trouble, for though the whole truth could easily be shirked, it would scarcely be possible to deny the relationship, or hush up his own share in the youthful escapade. For there had been sufficient for him to be dismissed by the magistrate with a reprimand for keeping bad company; and this, added to the scandal of a notorious criminal claiming kin to him, would militate against promotion. If Shureef would only drop down dead!
He did. The very day before the week was up he was shot in an organized attempt at escape on the part of five or six prisoners, who saw their opportunity in the temporary freedom of garden-work. A very determined attempt it was, involving violence, in which Shurruf gained fresh laurels by his promptness in ordering the sentry to fire. One man was wounded in the arm, and broke his leg in falling back from the wall he was scaling. Shureef was picked up quite dead behind the thicket of jasmine and rose. As two or three shots had been fired in that direction, it was possible it might have been an accident, and that he was not really one of the plotters; on the other hand both opium and tobacco were found upon him, proof positive that he had friends in the gaol. And though the warder, who had connived at the attempt at escape, and now pleaded guilty in the hope of lessening punishment, swore that Shureef was not in the plot, he had nothing to reply when Shurruf asked him for the name of any other gaol official who tampered with his duty.
"Poor devil!" said the Doctor, musingly, as he finished the necessary examination. "He was a fool to try--if he did; the run would have finished him to a certainty. Even the excitement of being in the fun might have killed him without anything else, for it was worse than I thought; his heart was mere tissue-paper."
Once more the Overseer's rich brown skin seemed to fade, though he was glib enough with his tongue. "He is to be buried tonight?" he asked easily.
"The sooner the better. His friends aren't likely to want him back; but all the same put him in the new yard." The Doctor's hand, as he drew up the sheet, finally lingered a bit. "If--if he wanted to get outside, he may as well, poor devil!"
So in the cool of the evening Shureef, wrapped in a white cloth, was taken from a solitary cell and given into the Guardianship of God in the sun-baked patch of earth where he was the first to lie. It was a desolate patch, bare of everything save a white efflorescence of salt, showing, as the warder remarked cynically, that it was only fit for corpses. Not even for them, dissented the diggers, who, with leg-irons clanking discordantly, lingered over their task while Shureef, a still, white roll of cloth, waited their pleasure. The soil, they said, was much harder than in the old place, and if folk were to be dug up as well as buried--not that any would want the expense of moving Shureef, whose name was a byword--here the Overseer's portly figure showed in the adjoining garden, and they hurried on with their work.
Shurruf did not come over to the grave, however, perhaps because he was in a demi-toilet of loose muslin, without his turban, and in charge of his little son, a pretty child of four, whom the obsequious gardener had presented with a bunch of jasmine and roses, and who, after a time becoming bored by his father's interest in the spinach and onions, drifted on by himself to find something more attractive, until he came to stand wide-eyed and curious in the mourners' place at the head of the grave. And there he stood silent, watching the proceedings and keeping a tight clutch on his flowers, until a hand from behind, dragging him back passionately, sent a shower of earth over the edge on to Shureef's body which had just been laid in its last resting-place, and sent also a bunch of roses and jasmines to lie close to Shureef's heart, for the child dropped them in his fright.
"Weep not, my prince!" cried the warder. "Thou shalt have them again. Here, some one, go down and hand them up."
But Shurruf, the Overseer, who, with his little son clutched up in his arms, stood now in the mourners' place, his face almost grey, turned on the man with a curse. "Let the flowers lie," he said; "there are plenty more in the garden." So, without another word, he left them to fill up the grave; and they, having done it, left Shureef with the flowers on his breast to the Guardianship of God.
And there he stayed month after month, until the year drew close to its end. And Shurruf Deen stayed in the gaol, for, after all, the man whose place he had hoped to get was allowed another year's extension of service. Perhaps it was the deferred hope which told on the Overseer's nerves; but certain it is that the passing months brought a strange look of anxiety to his face. Perhaps it was that, though he had set aside much, he could not quite set aside the thought of that bunch of roses and jasmine which his little son's hand had thrown upon Shureef's breast. Something there was in his mind without a doubt, which made him, but a few weeks before the Guardianship of God must end, and before the momentous question of promotion must be decided, steal out more than once at night to Shureef's solitary grave, as he had stolen to his solitary cell. But the memory of the still, white roll of cloth with the flowers upon it, touched him more closely than the memory of the listless figure letting the wheat-grains slip through its idle fingers. Why it should have done so it were hard to say. Fear had something to do with it--sheer superstition that when the Guardianship of God was over, the uncared-for body might fall into the keeping of the devil and torment him. Love had its part too; love, and a vague remorse born more of the chance which had made his little son chief mourner, than of a sense of personal guilt. Plainly it did not do to try and escape the tie of kindred altogether.
So, by degrees, the thought grew that it would indeed be safer for Shureef to pass into other guardianship before God's ended. He had asked for nothing, save that his grave might be cooled by tears; if this could be compassed, surely he ought to be satisfied, ought to forget everything else and leave his kindred in peace. And it might be compassed with care. Shureef's mother--not his own, for they had only been half-brothers--was alive, alive and blind, and poor too, since his father, stung by his son's disgrace, had sent her back to her own people. Poor, blind, and a mother! Here was material ready to his hand. It would not cost half a month's pay, even with the expenses of moving the body; and then--yes, then, when they were no longer needed, those flowers, even if they were dust, as they must be, could be taken away and forgotten.
It was the anniversary of Shureef's burial, and in the cool of the evening the clanking leg-irons were once more at work upon his grave; for, much to the Doctor's disgust, an old woman had put in an appearance at the last moment with unimpeachable credentials of relationship and sufficient cash to convey the remains to her village. There was, as Shurruf, the Overseer, said regretfully, no valid excuse for refusal, and the Doctor-sahib might rely upon his doing all things decently and in order, and on strict sanitary principles. Whereupon the Doctor had smiled grimly, and said that in cases of resurrection there was safety in extremes.
Nevertheless, it was the love of horrors, no doubt, which made the gathering round the opening grave so large. The old woman sate in the mourners' place, her tears flowing already. The others, however, talked over probabilities, and told tales of former disinterments with cheerful realism, while Shurruf Deen bustled backwards and forwards among his elaborate arrangements.
They dug down to one side of the original grave after approved fashion, so that there should be as little disturbance as possible, and when traces of what was sought showed in a fold of still, white shroud, extra cloths were sent down, in which, covering as they exposed, the workmen gradually swathed all that was mortal of the dead dacoit.
"He hath not lost much weight," said those at the ropes as they hauled.
So there the task was done, decently and in order. But Shurruf wanted something which he knew must still lie within the brand-new shroud, and, ere they lifted the gruesome bundle to the coffin awaiting it, he stooped,--then stood up suddenly, grey to the very lips, and crushing something in his hand, something, so it seemed to those around, pink and white and green. But his face riveted them. "In the Guardianship of God," he muttered, "in the Guardianship of God."
"What is it?" said one to another, as he stood dazed and speechless. Then they, too, stooped, looked, touched, until, as he had lain when they found him behind the rose and jasmine thicket, Shureef lay before them looking more as if he was asleep than dead.
"Wah!" said a voice in the crowd; "he cannot have been so bad as folk thought him, if the Lord has taken all that care of him."
Shurruf gave a sort of sob, stepped back, lost his footing on the edge of the open grave and fell heavily. When they picked him up he was dead.
The Doctor, summoned hastily, shook his head. Death must have been instantaneous, he said; the neck was broken. After which he went over and looked at Shureef curiously; then stooped down and picked up some of the earth on which the body lay, earth which had come from the bottom of the grave. "Look," he said, pointing out minute white crystals in it to the native assistant; "that's bi-borate of soda. I knew there was some of it here when I chose this patch. It's a useful antiseptic; but he has been in a regular mine of it--a curious case of embalming, isn't it?"
It certainly was; and it was still more curious that a bunch of fresh roses and jasmine should have been found on Shurruf Deen the Overseer's breast, as he lay in Shureef's grave; but, as the Doctor said, the obsequious gardener had most likely given them to him as he passed through the spinach and onion patches. And perhaps it was so.
[A BAD-CHARACTER SUIT]
A flood of blistering, yellow sunshine was pouring down on to the prostrate body of Private George Afford as he lay on his back, drunk, in an odd little corner between two cook-room walls in the barrack square; and a stream of tepid water from a skin bag was falling on his head as Peroo the bhisti stood over him, directing the crystal curve now on his forehead, now scientifically on his ears. The only result, however, was that Private George Afford tried unavailingly to scratch them, then swore unintelligibly.
Peroo twisted the nozzle of the mussuck to dryness, and knelt down beside the slack strength in the dust. So kneeling, his glistening curved brown body got mixed up with the glistening curved brown water-bag he carried, until at first sight he seemed a monstrous spider preying on a victim, for his arms and legs were skinny.
"Sahib!" he said, touching his master on the sleeve. It was a very white sleeve, and the buttons and belts and buckles all glistened white or gold in the searching sunlight, for Peroo saw to them, as he saw to most things about Private Afford's body and soul; why God knows, except that George Afford had once--for his own amusement--whacked a man who, for his, was whacking Peroo. He happened to be one of the best bruisers in the regiment, and George Afford, who was in a sober bout, wanted to beat him; which he did.
There was no one in sight; nothing in fact save the walls, and an offensively cheerful castor-oil bush which grew, greener than any bay-tree, in one angle, sending splay fingers of shadow close to Private Afford's head as if it wished to aid in the cooling process. But despite the solitude, Peroo's touch on the white sleeve was decorous, his voice deference itself.
"Sahib!" he repeated. "If the Huzoor does not get up soon, the Captain will find the master on the ground when he passes to rations. And that is unnecessary."
He might as well have spoken to the dead. George Afford's face, relieved of the douche treatment, settled down to placid, contented sleep. It was not a bad face; and indeed, considering the habits of the man, it was singularly fine and clear cut; but then in youth it had evidently been a superlatively handsome one also.
Peroo waited a minute or two, then undid the nozzle of his skin bag once more, and drenched the slack body and the dust around it.
"What a tyranny is here!" he muttered to himself, the wrinkles on his forehead giving him the perplexed look of a baby monkey; "yet the master will die of sunstroke if he be not removed. Hai, Hai! What it is to eat forbidden fruit and find it a turnip."
With which remark he limped off methodically to the quarter guard and gave notice that Private George Afford was lying dead drunk between cook-rooms Nos. 7 and 8; after which he limped on as methodically about his regular duty of filling the regimental waterpots. What else was there to be done? The special master whom he had elected to serve between whiles would not want his services for a month or two at least, since that period would be spent in clink. For Private George Afford was a habitual offender.
Such a very habitual offender, indeed, that Evan Griffiths, the second major, had not a word to say when the Adjutant and the Colonel conferred over this last offence, though he had stood Afford's friend many a time; to the extent even of getting him re-enlisted in India--a most unusual favour--when, after an interval of discharge, he turned up at his ex-captain's bungalow begging to be taken on; averring, even, that he had served his way out to India before the mast in that hope, since enlistment at the Depôt might take him to the other battalion. The story, so the Adjutant had said, was palpably false; but the silent little Major had got the Colonel to consent; so Private George Afford--an ideal soldier to look at--had given the master tailor no end of trouble about the fit of his uniform, for he was a bit of a dandy when he was sober. But now even Major Griffiths felt the limit of forbearance was past; nor could a court-martial be expected to take into consideration the trivial fact which lay at the bottom of the observant little Major's mercy, namely, that though when he was sober George Afford was a dandy, when he was drunk--or rather in the stage which precedes actual drunkenness--he was a gentleman. Vulgarity of speech slipped from him then; and even when he was passing into the condition in which there is no speech he would excuse his own lapses from strict decorum with almost pathetic apologies. "It is no excuse, I know, sir," he would say with a charming, regretful dignity, "but I have had a very chequered career--a very chequered career indeed."
That was true; and one of the black squares of the chessboard of life was his now, for the court-martial which sentenced Private George Afford to but a short punishment added the rider that he was to be thereinafter dismissed from Her Majesty's Service.
"He is quite incorrigible," said the Colonel, "and as we are pretty certain of going up to punish those scoundrels on the frontier as soon as the weather cools, we had better get rid of him. The regiment mustn't have a speck anywhere, and his sort spoils the youngsters."
The Major nodded.
So Private George Afford got his dismissal, also the bad-character suit of mufti which is the Queen's last gift even to such as he.
* * * * *
It was full six weeks after he had stood beside that prostrate figure between cook-rooms Nos. 7 and 8 that Peroo was once more engaged in the same task, though not in the same place.
And this time the thin stream of water falling on George Afford's face found it grimed and dirty, and left it showing all too clearly the traces of a fortnight's debauch. For Peroo, being of a philosophic mind, had told himself, as he had limped away from the quarter guard after his report, that now, while his self-constituted master would have no need of his services, was the time for him to take that leave home which he had deferred so long. Therefore, two or three days after this event, he had turned up at the Quartermaster's office with the curious Indian institution, "the changeling," and preferred his request for a holiday. It was granted, of course; there is no reason why leave should not be granted when a double, willing even to answer to the same name, stands ready to step into the original's shoes, without payment; that remaining a bargain between the doubles.
"Here," said Peroo, "is my brother. He is even as myself. His character is mine. We are all water-carriers, and he has done the work for two days. I will also leave him my skin bag, so that the Presence may be sure it is clean. He is a Peroo also."
He might have been the Peroo so far as the Quartermaster's requirements went. So the original went home and the copy took his place; but not for the two months. The order for active service of which the Colonel had spoken came sooner than was expected, and Peroo, hearing of it, started back at once for the regiment. A "changeling" could pass muster in peace, but war required the reality; besides, the master would, no doubt, be released. He was surely too good fighting material to be left behind, Peroo told himself; yet there his hero was, lying in the dust of a bye-alley in the bazaar in a ragged bad-character suit, while the barrack squares were alive with men, not half so good to look at, talking, as the mules were laden, of the deeds they were to do!
The wrinkles on Peroo's forehead grew more like those of a monkey in arms than ever. This was indeed a tyranny! but at least the Presence could be moved out of the burning sun this time without, of necessity, getting him into more trouble. So a few friends were called, and together they carried George Afford into the windowless slip of a room which Peroo locked at four o'clock in the morning and unlocked at ten at night, but which, nevertheless, served him as a home. There was nothing in it save a string bed and a drinking vessel; for Peroo, after his kind, ate his food in the bazaar; but that for the present was all the Englishman required either. So there Peroo left him in the darkness and the cool, safe for the day.
But after that? The problem went with Peroo as he limped about filling the cook-room waterpots, for on the morrow he must be filling them on the first camping-ground, fifteen miles away from that slip of a room where the master lay. What would become of him then?
The sandy stretches in which the barracks stood were full of mules, camels, carts, and men of all arms belonging to the small picked force which was to march with the one solid regiment at dawn on their mission of punishment.
"Pâni (water)," shouted a perspiring artilleryman, grappling with a peculiarly obstinate mule, as Peroo went past with his skin bag. "Pâni, and bring a real jildi (quickness) along with it. W'ot! you ain't the drinkin'-water, ain't yer? W'ot's that to me? I ain't one o' yer bloomin' Brahmins; but I'll take it outside instead o' in, because of them black-silly's o' the doctor's. So turn on the hose, Johnnie; I'll show you how."
"'E knows all about it, you bet," put in one of the regiment cheerfully. "Wy, 'e's bin hydraulic engineer and waterworks combined to that pore chap as got the sack the other day--George Afford--"
"Sure it was a thriflin' mistake wid the prepositions his godfathers made when they named him; for it was on and not off-erd he was six days out of sivin," remarked a tall Irishman.
"You hold your jaw, Pat," interrupted another voice. "'E was a better chap nor most, w'en 'e wasn't on the lap; and, Lordy! 'e could fight when he 'ad the chanst--couldn't 'e, Waterworks? Just turn that hose o' yours my way a bit, will yer?"
"Huzoor," assented Peroo, deferentially; he understood enough to make the thought pass through his brain that it was a pity the master had not the chance. Perhaps the curve of water conveyed this to that other brain beneath the close, fair curls, whence the drops flew sparkling in the sunlight. At any rate, their owner went on in a softer tone--
"Yes, 'e fit--like fits. Looked, too, as if 'e was born ter die on the field o' glory, and not in a bad-character suit; but, as the parson says: 'Beauty is vain. I will repay, saith the Lord.'"
The confused morality of this passed Peroo by; and yet something not altogether dissimilar lay behind his wrinkled forehead when, work over, he returned to the slip of a room and found Afford vaguely roused by his entrance.
"I--I am aware it is no possible excuse, sir," came his voice, curiously refined, curiously pathetic, "but I really have had a very chequered life, I have indeed."
"Huzoor," acquiesced Peroo, briefly; but even that was sufficient to bring the hearer closer to realities. He sat up on the string bed, looked about him stupidly, then sank back again.
"Get away! you d----d black devil," he muttered, with a sort of listless anger. "Can't you let me die in peace, you fool? Can't you let me die in the gutter, die in a bad-character suit? It's all I'm fit for--all I'm fit for." Voice, anger, listlessness, all tailed away to silence. He turned away with a sort of sob, and straightway fell asleep, for he was still far from sober.
Peroo lit a cresset lamp and stood looking at him. Beauty was certainly vain here, and if the Lord was going to repay, it was time He began. Time some one began, at any rate, if the man who had fought for him, Peroo, was not to carry out his desire of dying in the gutter--dying in a bad-character suit! The latter misfortune could, however, be avoided. Things were going cheap in the bazaar that evening, as was only natural when it was to be deserted for six months at least, so it ought not to be hard to get the master an exchange for something more suitable to his beauty, if not to his death.
Five minutes afterwards George Afford, too much accustomed to such ministrations to be disturbed by the process of undressing, was still asleep, his chin resting peacefully on Peroo's best white cotton shawl, and the bad-character suit was on its way to the pawnshop round the corner. It was nigh on an hour, however, before Peroo, having concluded his bargain, came back with it, and by the light of the cresset set to work appraising his success or failure. A success certainly. The uniform was old, no doubt, but it was a corporal's; and what is more, it had three good-conduct stripes on the arm. That ought to give dignity, even to a death in the gutter.
Peroo brought out some pipeclay and pumice-stone from a crevice, and set to work cheerfully on the buttons and belts, thinking as he worked that he had indeed made a good bargain. With a judicious smear of cinnabar here and there, the tunic would be almost as good as the master's old one--plus the good-conduct stripes, of course, which he could never have gained in the regiment.
But out of it? If, for instance, the Lord were really to repay Private George Afford for that good deed in defending a poor lame man?--a good deed which no bad one could alter for the worse! Peroo on this point would have been a match for a whole college of Jesuits in casuistry, as he laid on the pipeclay with lavish hand, and burnished the buttons till they shone like gold.
It was grey dawn when George Afford woke, feeling a deferential touch on his shoulder.
"Huzoor!" came a familiar voice, "the first bugle has gone. The Huzoor will find his uniform--a corporal's, with three good-conduct stripes--is ready. The absence of a rifle is to be regretted; but that shall be amended if the Huzoor will lend a gracious ear to the plan of his slave. In the meantime a gifting of the Huzoor's feet for the putting on of stockings might be ordered."
George Afford thrust out a foot mechanically, and sate on the edge of the string bed staring stupidly at the three good-conduct stripes on the tunic, which was neatly folded beside him.
"It is quite simple," went on the deferential voice. "The Huzoor is going to march with the colours, but he will be twelve hours behind them; that is all. He will get the fighting, and by-and-by, when the killing comes and men are wanted, the Colonel-sahib may give a place; but, in any case, there will always be the fighting. For the rest, I, the Huzoor's slave, will manage; and as there will, of necessity, be no canteen, there can be no tyranny. Besides, since there is not a cowrie in the master's jacket, what else is he to do?"
The last argument was unanswerable. George Afford thrust out his other foot to be shod for this new path, and stared harder than ever at the good-conduct stripes.
That night, despite the fatigues of a first day in camp, Peroo trudged back along the hard white road to meet some one whom he expected; for this was the first step, and he had, perforce, been obliged to leave his charge to his own devices for twelve hours amid the distractions of the bazaar. Still, without a cowrie in his pocket--Peroo had carefully extracted the few annas he had found in one--a man was more or less helpless, even for evil.
Despite this fact, there was a lilt in the lagging step which, just as Peroo had begun to give up hope of playing Providence, came slowly down the road. It belonged to George Afford, in the gentlemanly stage of drink. He had had a chequered life, he said almost tearfully, but there were some things a man of honour could not do. He could not break his promise to an inferior--a superior was another matter. In that case he paid for it honestly. But he had promised Peroo--his inferior--to come. So here he was; and that was an end of it.
It seemed more than once during the next few hours as if the end had, indeed, come. But somehow Peroo's deferential hand and voice extricated those tired uncertain feet, the weary sodden brain, from ditches and despair; still it was a very sorry figure which Peroo's own hasty footsteps left behind, safely quartered for the day in a shady bit of jungle, while he ran on to overtake the rear-guard if he could. The start, however, had been too much for his lameness, and he was a full hour late at his work; which, of course, necessitated his putting in an excuse. He chose drunkenness, as being nearest the truth, was fined a day's wages, and paid it cheerfully, thinking with more certainty of the sleeping figure he had left in the jungles.
The afternoon sun was slanting through the trees before it stirred, and George Afford woke from the sleep of fatigue superadded to his usual sedative. He felt strangely refreshed, and lay on his back staring at the little squirrels yawning after their midday snooze in the branches above him. And then he laughed suddenly, sate up and looked about him half confusedly. Not a trace of humanity was to be seen; nothing but the squirrels, a few green pigeons, and down in the mirror-like pool behind the trees--a pool edged by the percolating moisture from the water with faint spikes of sprouting grass--a couple of egrets were fishing lazily. Beyond lay a bare sandy plain, backed by faint blue hills--the hills where fighting was to be had. Close at hand were those three good-conduct stripes.
That night Peroo had not nearly so far to go back along the broad white road; yet the step which came echoing down it, if steadier, lagged more. Nor was Peroo's task much easier, for George Afford--in the abject depression which comes to the tippler from total abstinence--sate down in the dust more than once, and swore he would not go another step without a dram. Still, about an hour after dawn, he was once more dozing in a shady retreat with a pot of water and some dough cakes beside him, while Peroo, in luck, was getting a lift to the third camping-ground.
But even at the second, where the sleeping figure remained, the country was wilder, almost touching the "skirts of the hills," and so, when George Afford roused himself--as the animals rouse themselves to meet the coming cool of evening--a ravine deer was standing within easy shot, looking at him with head thrown back and wide, startled nostrils, scenting the unknown.
The sight stirred something in the man which had slept the sleep of the dead for years; that keen delight of the natural man, not so much in the kill as in the chase; not so much in the mere chase itself as in its efforts--its freedom. He rose, stretching his long arms in what was half a yawn, half a vague inclination to shake himself free of some unseen burden.
But that night he swore at Peroo for leading him a fool's dance; he threatened to go back. He was not so helpless as all that. He was not a slave; he would have his tot of rum like any other soldier as--
"Huzoor," interrupted Peroo, deferentially, "this slave is aware that many things necessary to the Huzoor's outfit as a soldier remain to be produced. But with patience all may be attained. Here, by God's grace, is the rifle. One of us--Smith-sahib of G Company, Huzoor--found freedom to-day. He was reconnoitring with Griffiths, Major-sahib, when one of these hell-doomed Sheeahs--whom Heaven destroy--shot him from behind a rock--"
Private George Afford seemed to find his feet suddenly. "Smith of G Company?" he echoed in a different voice.
"Huzoor!--the sahib whom the Huzoor thrashed for thrashing this slave--"
"Poor chap!" went on George Afford, as if he had not heard. "So they've nicked him--but we'll pay 'em out--we--" His fingers closed mechanically on the rifle Peroo was holding out to him.
* * * * *
It was a fortnight after this, and the camp lay clustered closely in the mouth of a narrow defile down which rushed a torrent swollen from the snows above; a defile which meant decisive victory or defeat to the little force which had to push their way through it to the heights above. Yet, though death, maybe, lay close to each man, the whole camp was in an uproar because Major Griffiths' second pair of putties had gone astray. The other officers had been content with one set of these woollen bandages which in hill-marching serve as gaiters, and help so much to lessen fatigue; but the Major, being methodical, had provided against emergencies. And now, when, with that possibility of death before him, his soul craved an extreme order in all things, his clean pair had disappeared. Now the Major, though silent, always managed to say what he meant. So it ran through the camp that they had been stolen, and men compared notes over the fact in the mess-tent and in the canteen.
In the former, the Adjutant with a frown admitted that of late there had been a series of inexplicable petty thefts in camp, which had begun with the disappearance of Private Smith's rifle. That might perhaps be explained in an enemy's country, but what the deuce anybody could want with a pair of bone shirt-studs--
"And a shirt," put in a mournful voice.
"Item a cake of scented soap," said another.
"And a comb," began a third.
The Colonel, who had till then preserved a discreet silence, here broke in with great heat to the Adjutant.
"Upon my soul, sir, it's a disgrace to the staff, and I must insist on a stringent inquiry the instant we've licked these hill-men. I--I didn't mean to say anything about it--but I haven't been able to find my tooth-brush for a week."
Whereupon there was a general exodus into the crisp, cold air outside, where the darkness would hide inconvenient smiles, for the Colonel was one of those men who have a different towel for their face and hands.
The stars were shining in the cleft between the tall, shadowy cliffs which rose up on either side, vague masses of shadow on which--seen like stars upon a darker sky--the watchfires of the enemy sparkled here and there. The enemy powerful, vigilant; and yet beside the camp-fires close at hand the men had forgotten the danger of the morrow in the trivial loss of the moment, and were discussing the Major's putties.
"It's w'ot I say all along," reiterated the romancer of G Company. "It begun ever since Joey Smith was took from us at Number Two camp. It's 'is ghost--that's w'ot it is. 'Is ghost layin' in a trew-so. Jest you look 'ere! They bury 'im, didn't they? as 'e was--decent like in coat and pants--no more. Well! since then 'e's took 'is rifle off us, an' a greatcoat off D Company, and a knapsack off A."
"Don't be lavin' out thim blankets he tuk from the store, man," interrupted the tall Irishman. "Sure it's a testhimony to the pore bhoy's character annyhow that he shud be wantin' thim where he is."
"It is not laughing at all at such things I would be, whatever," put in another voice seriously, "for it is knowing of such things we are in the Highlands--"
"Hold your second sight, Mac," broke in a third; "we don't want none o' your shivers tonight. You're as bad as they blamed niggers, and they swear they seen Joey more nor once in a red coat dodging about our rear."
"Well! they won't see 'im no more, then," remarked a fourth philosophically, "for 'e change 'is tailor. Leastways, 'e got a service khakee off Sergeant Jones the night afore last; the Sergeant took his Bible oath to 'ave it off Joey Smith's ghost, w'en 'e got time to tackle 'im, if 'e 'ave ter go to 'ell for it."
Major Griffiths meantime was having a similar say as he stood, eye-glass in eye, at the door of the mess-tent. "Whoever the thief is," he admitted, with the justice common to him, "he appears to have the instincts of a gentleman; but, by Gad, sir, if I find him he shall know what it is to take a field officer's gaiters."
Whereupon he gave a dissatisfied look at his own legs, a more contented one at the glimmering stars of the enemy's watchfires, and then turned in to get a few hours' rest before the dawn.
But some one a few miles farther down the valley looked both at his legs and at the stars with equal satisfaction. Some one, tall, square, straight, smoking a pipe--some one else's pipe, no doubt--beside the hole in the ground where, on the preceding night, the camp flagstaff had stood. That fortnight had done more for George Afford than give his outward man a trousseau; it had clothed him with a certain righteousness, despite the inward conviction that Peroo must be a magnificent liar in protesting that the Huzoor's outfit had either been gifted to him or bought honestly.
In fact, as he stood looking down at his legs complacently, he murmured to himself, "I believe they're the Major's, poor chap; look like him somehow." Then he glanced at the Sergeant's coatee he wore and walked up and down thoughtfully--up and down beside the hole in the ground where the flagstaff had stood.
So to him from the dim shadows came a limping figure.
"Well?" he called sharply.
"The orders are for dawn, Huzoor, and here are some more cartridges."
George Afford laughed; an odd, low little laugh of sheer satisfaction.
* * * * *
It was past dawn by an hour or two, but the heights were still unwon.
"Send some one--any one!" gasped the Colonel, breathlessly, as he pressed on with a forlorn hope of veterans to take a knoll of rocks whence a galling fire had been decimating every attack. "Griffiths! for God's sake, go or get some one ahead of those youngsters on the right or they'll break--and then--"
Break! What more likely? A weak company, full of recruits, a company with its officers shot down, and before them a task for veterans--for that indifference to whizzing bullets which only custom brings. Major Griffiths, as he ran forward, saw all this, saw also the ominous waver. God! would he be in time to check it--to get ahead? that was what was wanted, some one ahead--no more than that--some one ahead!
There was some one. A tall figure ahead of the wavering boys.
"Come on! come on, my lads! follow me!" rang out a confident voice, and the Major, as he ran, half-blinded by the mists of his own haste, felt it was as a voice from heaven.
"Come on! come on!--give it 'em straight. Hip, hip, hurray!"
An answering cheer broke from the boys behind, and with a rush the weakest company in the regiment followed some one to victory.
* * * * *
"I don't understand what the dickens it means," said the Colonel almost fretfully that same evening, when, safe over the pass, the little force was bivouacking in a willow-set valley on the other side of the hills. Before it lay what it had come to gain, behind it danger past. "Some one in my regiment," he went on, "does a deuced plucky thing--between ourselves, saves the position: I want naturally to find out who it was, and am met by a cock and bull story about some one's ghost. What the devil does it mean, Major?"
The Major shook his head. "I couldn't swear to the figure, sir, though it reminded me a bit--but that's impossible. However, as I have by your orders to ride back to the top, sir, and see what can be done to hold it, I'll dip over a bit to where the rush was made, and see if there is any clue."
He had not to go so far. For in one of those tiny hollows in the level plateau of pass, whence the snow melts early, leaving a carpet of blue forget-me-nots and alpine primroses behind it, he, Sergeant Jones, and the small party going to make security still more secure, came upon Peroo, the water-carrier, trying to perform a tearful travesty of the burial service over the body of George Afford.
It was dressed in Sergeant Jones' tunic and Major Griffiths' putties, but the Sergeant knelt down beside it, and smoothed the stripes upon the cuff with a half-mechanical, half-caressing touch, and the Major interrupted Peroo's protestations with an odd tremor in his voice.
"What the devil does it matter," he said sharply, "what he took besides the pass? Stand aside, man; this is my work, not yours. Sergeant! form up your men for the salute--ball cartridge."
The Major's recollection of the service for the burial of the dead was not accurate, but it was comprehensive. So he committed the mortal remains of his brother soldier to the dust, confessing confusedly that there is a natural body and a spiritual body--a man that is of the earth earthy, and one that is the Lord from heaven. So following on a petition to be saved from temptation and delivered from evil, the salute startled the echoes, and they left George Afford in the keeping of the pass, and the pass in his keeping. And as the Major rode campwards, he wondered vaguely if some one before the great white throne wore a bad-character suit, or whether wisdom understood the plea, "I've had a very chequered life, I have indeed."
But Peroo had no such thoughts; needed no such excuse. It was sufficient for him that the Huzoor had once been the protector of the poor.
[FIRE AND ICE]
It was in a little lath-and-plaster house down by the river that it all happened. The veriest confection of a house, looking for all the world as if it were a Neapolitan ice. Strawberry and vanilla in alternate stripes, with shuttered windows of coffee, and a furled wafer of an awning over the filagree chocolate balcony. And it rested, so to speak, against a platter of green plantain-leaves, bright as any emerald. No doubt the trees belonging to the leaves grew somewhere to the back or the side of it, but from the wide street in front you could see nothing but the green leaves surrounding the ice-cream.
For the rest it was a three-storeyed house outwardly; inwardly a two-storeyed one; or to be strictly accurate, it consisted of a storey and a half, since the further half of the ground floor and the whole of the middle storey belonged to a different house, having a different entrance in a different street, which lay in a different quarter. A very respectable quarter indeed, whereas the less said about the morals of the wide street down by the river the better. They were so bad that the modesty of the middle storey did not permit of a single window whence they could be seen. And this gave the house a queer, half-hearted look, for the top storey, and that half of the lowest one which belonged to it, were full of windows and doors opening on to the broad path leading to destruction. There were five, with fretted wooden architraves filling up the whole of the ground floor, so that you could see straight into the long, shallow hall whence there was no exit save by a narrow slit in the middle, showing a dim, steep staircase. It was always empty, this hall, though it was carpeted with striped carpets, and painted elaborately in flowery arabesques of a dull, pale, pink and flaming crimson; an odd mixture reminding you vaguely of bloodstains on a rose-leaf. And there was a red lamp over the centre door, which sent a rosy redness into the growing dusk; for it was lit early.
So was the pale--the palest of green lights--on the top storey which you could see swinging from the roof when the coffee-ice shutters were thrown back as the evening breeze came down the river. It was pale, yet bright like the first star at sunsetting.
And sometimes, but not often, if you watched in the early dusk you might see the owner of the ice-cream house flit across the open window. She was like a sugar-drop herself, rose or saffron decked with silver leaf, a slender scrap of a creature who tinkled as she walked and gave out a perfume of heavy scented flowers. But this was seldom; more often you only heard the tinkle, either of silver or laughter, since Burfâni--for that was her name--was of those who barter the one for the other. It was in truth her hereditary trade, though neither her father nor her mother had practised it; their rôle in life having been that of pater and mater-familias. A very necessary one if the race is to survive, and so in this generation, also, her brother had undertaken the duty of marrying his first cousin. The young couple being now, in the privacy and propriety of the second storey, engaged in bringing up a fine family of girls to succeed to the top storey when Burfâni's age should drive her to a lower place in life. In the meantime, however, she allowed them so much a month; enough to enable idle Zulfkar to fight quail in the bazaars and keep his wife Lâzîzan in the very strictest seclusion--as befitted one filched from the profession of bartering smiles in order to fulfil the first duty of a woman--the rearing of babes.
Thus, in more ways than one, the house was conglomerate. On the side overlooking the broad path there was the stained rose-leaf hall, empty, swept, and garnished, and the dark stair leading up and up to the wandering star of a lamp twinkling out into the sunset amid the sound of laughter and money. On the side giving upon narrow respectability a hall full of household gear and dirt where the little girls played, and a dark stair leading to a darker room where Lâzîzan sat day after day bewailing her sad fate; for, of course, life would have been much gayer over the way, since she was a beautiful woman. Far more beautiful in a lavish, somewhat loud fashion, than the lady belonging to the ice-cream house with her delicate, small face; but that was the very reason why she had been chosen out from many to carry on the race as it ought to be carried on. Burfâni, of course, was clever, and that counted for much, but it never did in their profession to rely on brains above looks. Nevertheless Lâzîzan, when in a bad temper, was in the habit of telling herself that if she had been taught to sing and dance, as the little lady had been taught, she could have made the ice-cream house a more paying concern than it was--to judge by the pittance they received from it! And this angry complaint grew with her years until as she sat suckling her fourth child, she felt sometimes as if she could strangle it, even though it was a boy, and though as a rule she was an affectionate mother. In truth the sheer animal instinct natural to so finely developed a creature lasted out the two or three years during which her children were hers alone; after that, when they began crawling downstairs and playing in the hall where she might never go, she became jealous and then forgot all about them.
Nevertheless, the boy being only some nine months old when he was suddenly carried off by one of those mysterious diseases common to Indian children, she wept profusely, and told Burfâni--who, as in duty bound, came round decently swathed in a burka to offer condolence on hearing of the sad event--that some childless one had doubtless cast a shadow on him for his beauty's sake, seeing that--thank Heaven!--all her children were beautiful. There was always a militant flavour underlying the politeness of these two, and even the presence of the quaint little overdressed dead baby awaiting its bier on the bed did not prevent attack and defence.
"They favour thee, sister," replied Burfâni, suavely. "In mind also, to judge from what I see. Therefore I shall await God's will in the future ere I choose one to educate."
Lâzîzan tittered sarcastically, despite her half-dried tears.
"'Tis my choice first, nevertheless. The best of this bunch in looks--ay, in brains too, perchance--marries my brother's son, according to custom. Sure my mother chose thus, and I must do the same, sister."
She spoke evenly, though for the moment the longing to strangle something had transferred itself to the saffron-coloured sugar-drop all spangled with silver which had emerged from its chrysalis of a burka. What business had the poor thin creature with such garments when her beauty was hidden by mere rags?
Burfâni laughed in her turn; an easy, indifferent laugh, and stretched out her slim henna-dyed palm with the usual friendly offering of cardamoms.
"Take one, sister," she said soothingly, "they are good for spleen and excessive grief. Hai! Hai! thou wilt be forlorn, indeed, now thy occupation is gone."
Lâzîzan, with her mouth full of spices, tittered again more artificially than ever. "I can do other things, perchance, beside suckle babes. Maybe I weary of it, and am glad of a change."
The saffron-coloured sugar-drop, seated on a low stool in front of the white-sheeted bed with its solemn little gaily-dressed burden, looked at its companion distastefully through its long lashes, and the slender, henna-dyed hand, catching some loops of the jasmine chaplets it wore, held them like a bouquet close to the crimson-tinted lips.
"It is a virtuous task, my sister," quoth Burfâni, gravely sniffing away at the heavy perfume, as if she needed something to make her environment less objectionable. "Besides, it is ever a mistake to forsake the profession of one's birth--"
"And wherefore should I?" interrupted Lâzîzan, seizing her opportunity recklessly. "Hast thou forsaken it, and are we not sisters?"
Again a cold, critical look of dislike came from the long, narrow eyes with their drowsy lids.
"Such words are idle, sister. Forget them. Thou wouldst not find it easier--"
"How canst tell?" interrupted Lâzîzan once more. "As well say that thou couldst put up with my life."
The saffron and silver daintiness shifted its look towards the bed, and the henna-dyed hand straightened a wrinkle in the sheet softly.
"God knows!" she said with a sudden smile. "Anyhow, sister, 'tis not wise to change one's profession as one grows old."
As one grows old! This parting shot rankled long after the decent burka had slipped like a shadow through the swept and garnished hall, and so up the dark stairs to the wandering starlight shining feebly out into the sunset; long after the preacher and the bier, and the family friends had carried the gaily-dressed baby to its grave, leaving the mother to the select and secluded tears of her neighbours; long after the little girls, wearied out with excitement, had fallen asleep cuddled together peacefully, innocent of that choice in the future; long after Zulfkar, full of liquor, tears, and curses, due to a surplusage in the funeral expenses allowed by Burfâni, to parental grief, and to bad luck at cards, came home, desirous of sympathy. He got none, for Lâzîzan, despite her seclusion, had never lost the empire which he felt she deserved as the handsomest woman he knew. 'Twas his own fault, she said curtly; he could marry another wife, have more liquor, and gamble as much as he liked if he chose. It was but a question of money, and if he were content to put up with beggarly alms from his sister, that ended the matter.
Whereupon, being in the maudlin stage of drink, he wept still more.
It must have been fully three months after the baby's funeral procession had gone down the respectable street, and so by a side alley found its way into the broad path leading alike to destruction and the graveyard, that Burfâni went round to her sister-in-law's again. This time she was in pink and silver, like a rose-water ice, and her words were cold as her looks.
"Say what thou wilt, Lâzîzan, the youth lingers. Have I not windows to my house? Have I not eyes? And such things shall not be bringing disgrace to respectable families."
Lâzîzan tittered as usual: "Lo! what a coil, because an idle stranger lingers at the back instead of the front, 'Tis for thy sake doubtless, sister, though thou art unkind. I wonder at it, seeing he is not ill-favoured."
"So thou hast seen him! So be it. See him no more, or I tell Zulfkar."
"Tell him what? That thou hast cast eyes on a handsome stranger, and because he comes not to thy call wouldst fasten the quarrel upon me? Zulfkar is no fool, sister, he will not listen!"
"If he listen not, he can leave my house--for 'tis mine. And mark my words, Lâzîzan Bibi, no scandal comes nigh it."
Cæsar's wife could not have spoken with greater unction, and in good sooth she meant her words, since in no class is seclusion bound to be more virtuous than in that to which Burfâni belonged.
So, as the motes in the sunbeam of life danced along the broad path in front of the ice-cream house, and drifted up its dark stair, the painted and perfumed little lady under the pale green lamp kept an eye upon the virtue of her family. Thus ere long it came to be Zulfkar's turn to listen to his sister's warning, and as he listened he sucked fiercely, confusedly, at the inlaid hookah which stood for the use of approved visitors; for in good sooth there had been more money to spend of late, and Lâzîzan was discreet enough save to those watchful, experienced eyes. The sound of his hubblings and bubblings therefore was his only answer, and they filled the wide, low, white-plastered upper storey, frescoed round each coffee-shuttered window with flowery devices, until Burfâni lost patience, and began coldly:
"Hast been taking lessons of a camel, brother?" she asked, rustling the tinsel-decked fan she held; and then suddenly she seemed to grasp something, and the contemptuous indifference of her bearing changed to passionate anger. Her silver-set feet clashed as they touched the floor, and she rose first to a sitting posture, finally to stand before the culprit, the very personification of righteous wrath.
"So! thou hast taken gold! This is why thou canst ruffle with the best at Gulâbun's--base-born parvenu who takes to the life out of wickedness--as she hath done, bringing disgrace to the screened house where thy mother dwelt in decency. But thou dwellest there no longer--thou eatest no bread of mine--I will choose my pupil from another brood."
"Nay, sister, 'tis not proved," stammered Zulfkar.
"Not proved!" she went on still more passionately. "Nay, 'tis not proved to thy neighbours, maybe, but to me? Mine eyes have seen--I know the trick--and out thou goest. I will have no such doings in my house, and so I warned her months ago. But there! what need for railing? Live on her gold an thou wiliest, it shall not chink beside mine."
She sank back upon the silk coverlet again, and with a bitter laugh began to rustle the tinsel fan once more. And Zulfkar, after unavailing protests, slunk down the dark stairs, and so along the street to a certain house over the liquor-seller's shop, about which a noisy crowd gathered all day long.
And that night screams and blows came from the second storey, and unavailing curses on the mischief-maker. But if the latter heard them, she gave no sign to the approved visitors drinking sherbets in the cool upper storey with the windows set wide to the stars.
It was Zulfkar beating his wife, of course, because she was so handsome primarily; secondly, because she had been foolish enough to be found out; thirdly, because even in liquor he was sharp enough to recognise that Burfâni would keep her word.
And she did. The supplies stopped from that day. Within a week the second storey lay empty, while Lâzîzan wept tears of pain and spite in a miserable little lodging in the very heart of the city. It is difficult even to hint at the impotent rage the woman felt towards her sister-in-law. Even Zulfkar's blows were forgotten in the one mad longing to revenge herself upon the pink-and-saffron daintiness which would not spare one crumb from a full table. For so to Lâzîzan's coarse, passionate nature the matter presented itself, bringing with it a fierce delight at the perfections of her own lover. He had deserted her for the time, it is true, but that was the way of lovers when husbands were angry; by-and-by he would come back, and there would be peace, since Zulfkar must have gold.
So ran her calculations; but she reckoned without a certain fierce intolerance which the latter shared with his sister; also somewhat prematurely on an immediate emptying of his pockets. But luck was not all against him; the cards favoured him. And so, when a few days after the flitting from the second storey, she, being sick to death of dulness, thought the time had come for self-assertion, she found herself mistaken. Zulfkar, still full of Dutch courage, fell upon her again, and beat her most unmercifully, finishing up with an intimidatory slash at her nose. It was not much, not half so serious as the beating, but the very thought of possible disfigurement drove her mad, and the madness drove her to a corner where she could plan revenge while Zulfkar slept heavily--for he was more than half drunk. And this, too, was the fault of the saffron-and-rose devil in the upper storey, who had her amusement and spied upon other women's ways. And this meant days more ere she, Lâzîzan, would be presentable, even if she did not carry the mark to her grave, and all because that she-devil was jealous--jealous of her lover!
Oh for revenge! And why not? The door was unlatched, since Zulfkar had forgotten it in his anger; the streets were deserted. Even the broad path down by the river would be asleep, the green light gone from above, only the red lamp swinging over the outer door, sending a glow.... Fire! The thought leapt to her brain like a flame itself. Why not? Zulfkar had purposely kept--all unbeknown to the she-devil--a second key to that empty second floor, and he was in a drunken sleep. If she stole it--if she took the bottle of paraffin--if she set fire to the wooden partition separating the stairs--if she broke the red lamp and pretended that was it--
She did not stop to think. She had begun the task almost before she had thought out the details, and was fumbling in Zulfkar's pockets as he lay. And there were two bottles of paraffin in the corner; that was because he had brought one home, and the market-woman another by mistake. So much the better, so much the bigger blaze. Then out into the street, not forgetting a box of safety matches--strange companions to such a task. She knew her way well, having wandered free enough as a child before the lot was drawn, the die cast which sent her to suckle babes. Yet, being a woman beset by a thousand superstitious fears, it needed all her courage ere she found herself face to face with the thin wooden partition surrounding the steep stair leading upwards. How many times had she not listened to feet ascending those unseen stairs, and heard the tinkle of laughter as the unseen door above opened?
Well, it would blaze finely, and cut off at once all means of escape. A devilish plan indeed, and the leaping flames, ere she left them to their task, showed the face of a fiend incarnate.
And so to wait for the few minutes before the whole world must know that the saffron and the rose daintiness was doomed. No more laughter--no more lovers--that would be for her, Lâzîzan, not for the other with her cold sneers.
A licking tongue of flame showed for an instant and made her pray Heaven none might see it too soon. Then a crackle, a puff of smoke, next a cry of fire, but, thank Heaven, only from the broad path. And what good were the running feet, what good the shouts of the crowd in which her shrouded figure passed unnoticed, unless the upper storey had wings? For the stairs must be gone--hopelessly gone--by this time.
More than the stairs, for with one sudden blaze the lath-and-plaster house seemed to melt like ice itself before the sheet of flame which the soft night wind bent riverwards.
And still the top storey slept, or was it suffocated? No! there was some one at the window--some one gesticulating wildly. A man--not a woman.
"Throw yourself down!" cried an authoritative foreign voice, "'tis your only chance."
Surely, since the ice melted visibly during the sudden hush which fell upon the jostling crowd.
"Throw yourself down!" came the order again; "we'll catch you if we can. Stand back, good people."
"Quick! it's your last chance," came the inexorable voice once more. Then there was a leap, a scream--a crash, as in his despair the man overleapt the mark and fell among the parting crowd. Fell right at Lâzîzan's feet face uppermost.
And it was the face of the handsome stranger--of her lover.
Her shriek echoed his as she flung herself beside him. And at the sound something white and ghostlike slipped back from the window with a tinkle of laughter.
"Burfâni! Burfâni!" shouted the crowd. "Drop gently--we'll save you! Burfâni! Burfâni!"
But there was no answer; and the next moment with a roar and a crash Vice fell upon Virtue, and both together upon the swept and garnished hall and the hall where the little girls had played.
The ice-cream house had become a blazing pile of fire.
[THE SHÂHBÂSH WALLAH]
Shâhbâsh, Bhaiyan, Shâhbâsh!
The words, signifying "Bravo, boys, bravo!" came in a despondent drawl from the coolie leaning against the ladder--one of those crazy bamboo ladders with its rungs tied on with grass twine at varying slants and distances, whereon the Indian house-decorator loves to spend long days in company with a pot of colour-wash and a grass brush made from the leavings of the twine.
There were two such ladders in the bare, oblong, lofty room, set round with open doors and windows, and on each was balanced a man, a pot, and a brush--all doing nothing. So was the coolie below.
He was a small, slight man, with a dejected expression. Stark naked, save for two yards or so of coarse muslin wisped about his short hair and a similar length knotted about his middle. What colour either had been originally could not be guessed, since both were completely covered with splashes of colour-wash--blue, green, yellow, and pink. So was his thin body, which, as he stood immovable at the bottom of the ladder, looked as if it was carved out of some rare scagiola.
For they were doing up the hospital in Fort Lawrence, and Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, of the 10th Sikh Pioneers--then engaged in making military roads over the Beloochistan frontier--had an eye for colour. Not so, however, Surgeon-Major Pringle, who that very morning had marched in with the detachment of young English recruits which had been sent to take possession of the newly enlarged fort. It was a queer mud building, looking as if it were a part of the mud promontory which blocked a sharp turn in the sun-dried, heat-baked mud valley, through which the dry bed of a watercourse twisted like the dry skin of a snake. Everything dry, everything mud, baked to hardness by the fierce sun. It was an ugly country in one way, picturesque in another, with its yawning fissures cracking the mud hills into miniature peaks and passes, its almost leafless flowering shrubs, aromatic, honeyful, and its clouds of painted butterflies. A country in which colour was lost in sheer excess of sunshine.
That, however, was not the reason why Surgeon-Captain O'Brien had painted his wards to match Joseph's coat. As he explained to Surgeon-Major Pringle, who, as senior officer, took over charge, it was wiser, in his opinion--especially with youngsters about--to call wards by the colour of their walls rather than by the diseases to be treated in them; since if a patient "wance found out what was really wrong with his insoide, he was sure to get it insthanter."
The Surgeon-Major, fresh from England and professional precisions--fresh also to India and its appeals to the imagination--had felt it impossible to combat such statements seriously. Besides, there was no use in doing so. The walls were past remedy for that year, and even the post-mortem house--that last refuge of all diseases--was being washed bright pink; a colour which, according to Terence O'Brien, was "a nice, cheerful tint, that could not give annyone, not even a corpse, the blues."
In the course of which piece of work the small man at the foot of the ladder was becoming more and more like a statue in rosso antico, as he repeated: "Shâhbâsh, bhaiyan, shâhbâsh!" at regular intervals.
His voice had no resonance, and not an atom of enthusiasm about it; but, like a breeze among rain-soaked trees, it always provoked a pitter-patter of falling drops--a patter of pink splashes like huge tears--upon the concrete floor and the scagiola figure. For the words set the brushes above moving slowly for a while; then the spasm of energy passed, all was still again, until a fresh "Bravo, boys, bravo!" was followed by a fresh shower of pink tears.
"Lazy brutes!" came a boy's voice from the group of young recruits who were enjoying a well-earned rest after having marched in fifteen miles, carrying their kits as if they had been born with them, and settling down into quarters as if they were veterans. For they were smart boys, belonging to a smart regiment, whose recruiting ground lay far from slums and scums; one whose officers were smart also, and kept up the tone of their men by teaching them a superior tolerance for the rest of the world. "Jest look at that feller--like an alley taw. He ain't done a blessed 'and's turn since I began to watch 'im." They were seated on some shady mud steps right over against the hospital compound, and the post-mortem house being separate from the wards, and having all its many windows and doors set wide, the inside of it was as plainly visible as the out.
"Rum lot," assented another voice with the same ring of wholesome self-complacency in it. "I arst one of the Sickees, as seems a decent chap for a nigger and knows a little decent lingo, wot the spotted pig was at with his everlastin' shabbashes, an' 'e says it's to put courage to the Johnnies up top. Not that I don't say I shouldn't cotton myself much to them ladders, that's more like caterpillars than a decent pair o' 'ouse-steps. A poor lot--that's wot they are, as doesn't know the differ in holt between a nail and a bit o' twine."
"Well, mates," said a third voice, "all I can say is that if they ain't got no more courage than shâhbâsh can put to them, it's no wonder we licks the blooming lot of them--as we does constant."
There was a faint laugh first, and then the group sucked at their pipes decisively as they watched the doings in the post-mortem. Though they would have scouted the suggestion, the shâhbâsh wallah had justified his calling; for patriotism brings courage with it.
He did not trouble his head about justification, however. Some one, in his experience, always did the shouting, and it suited him better than more active occupation, for he was lame; stiff, too, in his back. Surgeon-Major Pringle, coming in later to find the post-mortem very much as it had been hours before, looked at him distastefully, and began a remark about what two English workmen could have done, which Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien interrupted with his charming smile: "Sure, sir, the sun rises a considerable trifle airlier East than West, an' that's enough energy for wan hemisphere. Besides, ye can't get on in India without a shâhbâsh wallah. Or elsewhere, for that matter. Ye always require 'the something not ourselves which makes for righteousness'--"
"Makes for fiddlesticks!" muttered the senior under his breath, adding aloud, "Who the dickens is the shâhbâsh wallah when he is at home, and what's his work?" He asked the question almost reluctantly, for his junior's extremely varied information had, since the morning, imparted a vague uncertainty to a round world which had hitherto, in Dr. Pringle's estimation of it, been absolutely sure--cocksure!
"What is he? Oh! he's a variety of names. He's objective reality, moral sanction, antecedent experience, unconditioned good. Ye can take yer choice of the lot, sir; and if ye can't win the thrick with metaphysics--I can't, and that's the thruth--play thrumps. Sentiment!--sympathy! Ye can't go wrong there. Ye can't leave them out of life's equation, East or West. Just some one--a fool, maybe--to say ye're a fine fellow, an' no misthake, at the very moment whin ye know ye're not. Biogenesis, sir, is the Law of Life. As Schopenhauer says, the secret that two is wan, is the--"
His senior gave an exasperated sigh, and preferred changing the subject. So at the appointed time, no sooner, no later, the last patter of pink tears fell from the brushes upon the floor of the post-mortem and upon the still figure, which might have been a corpse save for its drowsy applause--"Bravo, boys, bravo!" Then the caterpillar ladders, with the decorators and the pots of colour-wash and the brushes still attached to them, crawled away, and the shâhbâsh wallah followed in their wake, his skin bearing mute evidence to the amount of work he had provoked.
His turban and waistcloth testified to it for days--in lessening variety of tint as the layers of pink, green, blue, and yellow splashes wore off--for at least a fortnight, during which time Surgeon-Major Pringle, busy in making all things conform to his ideal, constantly came across the shâhbâsh wallah bestowing praise where, in the doctor's opinion, none was deserved. What right, for instance, had the water-carriers filling their pots, the sweepers removing the refuse, to senseless commendation for the performance of their daily round, their common task?
Especially when it was so ill performed; even in the matter of punkah-pulling, a subject on which the native might be credited with some knowledge. Surgeon-Major Pringle seethed with repressed resentment for days over the intermittent pulse of the office punkah, and finally, in a white heat of discomfort and indignation, burst out into the verandah, harangued the coolie at length, and in the fulness of Western energy went so far as to show him how to keep up a regular, even swing. His masterly grasp of a till then untouched occupation not only satisfied himself but also the shâhbâsh wallah, who, as usual, was lounging about in the verandah doing nothing. So, of course, his "Shâhbâsh, jee, shâhbâsh," preceded Surgeon-Major Pringle's hasty return to the office and prepared Terence O'Brien for the dictum that the offender must be sent about his business; for if he was a camp-follower he must have some business, some regular work.
"Worrk, is it?" echoed Terence with his charming smile of pure sympathy. "Be jabers! yes. Worrk--plenty, but not regular, as a rule. The man's a torch-bearer. If it happens to be a dark night, and annybody wants a dhooli, he carries the torch for it."
Dr. Pringle's resentful surprise made him stutter: "Do you mean to say that--that--that--that--the public money--the ratepayers' money--is wasted in entertaining a whole man for so trivial a task?"
"Trivial, is it? When he's a pillar of fire by night an' a cloud of witnesses by day? And then he isn't a whole man, sir, at all at all. Wan of his legs is shorter than the other. I had to break it twice, sir, to get it as straight as it is. Thin, I've grave doubts about his spinal column; and as I trepanned him myself, I know his head isn't sound. It was two ton of earth fell on him, sir, last rains, when he was givin' a drink to wan of the Sikhs that got hurt blasting. It's nasty, shifty stuff, sir, is the mud in these low hills--nasty silted alluvial stuff, with a bias in it. So, poor divvle! seeing he wasn't fit for much but the hospital, I put him to the staff of it. And he kapes things going. Indeed, I wouldn't take it upon myself to say that he doesn't do the native patients as much good as half the drugs I exhibit to the unfortunate craythurs, since for sheer mystherious dispensations of Providence commend me to the British pharmacopœia."
Once again Surgeon-Major Pringle felt that professional dignity could best be served by silent contempt, and orders that the offender was, at least, not to loaf about the verandahs.
But the fates were against the fiat. In the moonless half of May, driest of all months, a Hindu returning from Hurdwar fell sick, and half-an-hour after the report, Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, going out of the ward with his senior, paused in his cheerful whistling of "Belave me, if all those endearing young charms," to say under his breath, "Cholera, mild type." Now cholera, no matter of what type, has an ugly face when seen for the first time, especially when the face which looks into it, wondering if it means life or death, has youth in its eyes. So in the dark nights the dhooli came into requisition, and with it the torch-bearer, until the green and the blue and yellow wards overflowed into the verandahs, and even the pink post-mortem claimed its final share of boys. Not a large one, however, since, as Terence O'Brien said, "It was wan of those epidemics when ye couldn't rightly say a man had cholera till he died of it."
It was bad enough, however, to make the Surgeon-Major, who had never seen one before, set to work when it passed, suddenly as it had come, to cipher out averages, and tabulate treatments, with a view to what is called future guidance. And so, as he confided to his assistant with great complacency, it became clear as daylight that the largest percentage of recoveries, their rapidity, and as a natural corollary the incidence of mildness in the attack itself, seemed in connection with the position of the cots. Those close to the doors, or actually on the verandahs, were the most fortunate, and so he was inclined to believe in the value of currents of fresh air.
"Fresh air, is it?" echoed Terence, with an encouraging smile. "Maybe; maybe not. God knows, it may be anything in the wide wurrld, since there's but wan thing you can bet your bottom dollar on in cholera, sir, and that is that ye can't tell anything about it for certain, and that your experience of wan epidemic won't be that of the next."
"Neither does your experience, Mr. O'Brien," retorted his senior, sarcastically, "militate against mine being more fortunate. I mean to leave no stone unturned to arrive at reliable data on points which appear to me to have been overlooked. For instance, I shall begin by asking those cases of recovery if they remember anything which seemed at the time to bring them relief, to stimulate in them that vitality which it is so essential to preserve."
In pursuance of which plan he went out then and there to the verandah, where a dozen or more lank boys were lounging about listlessly, just beginning to feel that life might soon mean more than a grey duffle dressing-gown and a long chair.
"No, sir," said the first, firmly. "I disremember anythin' that done me good. I jest lay with a sickenin' pain in my inside, an' a don't-care-if-I-do feelin' outside." He paused, and another boy took up the tale sympathetically.
"So it was. A reg'lar, don't-care except w'en that little 'eathen--'im that's always saying shâhbâsh, sir, come along; an' that seem to me most times. 'E made me feel a blamed sight--beggin' pardon, sir--worse. For I kep' thinkin' of where I see 'im first, like a alley taw in the dead 'ouse; and the dead 'ouse isn't a cheerful sorter think w'en you ain't sure but wot you're going there. It made me--" he paused in his turn.
"Made you what?" asked Terence O'Brien, who had followed to listen.
"Give me the 'orrors, sir, till I'd 'ave swopped all I knew to kick 'im quiet; but not bein' able, I jest lay and kep' it for 'im against I could, till it seemed like as I must; an' so I will."
"In cases of extreme nervous depression, sir," began the junior, mischievously, "a counter irritant--"
"Pshaw!" interrupted Dr. Pringle, angrily, and walked back with great dignity to the office.
But the conversation thus started lingered among the grey dressing-gowns, the result of comparing notes being a general verdict that "Alley taw" deserved that kicking. He did not actually get it, however; the boys were too big, and he too small for that. But he sank into still greater disrepute, becoming, in truth, that most unenviable of all things not made nor created, but begotten of idle wit--a garrison butt. Not that he seemed to care much. He grew more furtive in his lounging, but nothing seemed to disturb the divine calm of his commendation for the world which he had created for himself with his "Bravo, boys, bravo!" Behold, all things in it were very good! That, at least, was Terence O'Brien's fanciful way of looking at the position. As he went about his work whistling "Belave me, if all those endearing young charms"--a tune which, he said, cheered the boys--he would often pause to smile at the shâhbâsh wallah. After a time, however, the smile would change to a quick narrowing of the eyes, as if something in the bearing of the man was puzzling. Finally, one day, coming upon the man sidling along a bit of brick wall, which had been built to strengthen a crack in the mud one overhanging the dry watercourse, he pulled up, asked a few rapid questions, and then lifted the man's eyelids and peered into the soft brown eyes, as if he wanted to see through them to a crack he knew of in the back of the man's skull.
"And you are sure you see as well as ever?" he asked again.
"Quite as well, Huzoor," came the answer, with a faint tremor in it. "I can see to carry the torch on the darkest of nights if it is wanted, Huzoor!"
"Hm!" said Dr. O'Brien, doubtfully, promising himself to test the truth of this statement. But the fates again decreed otherwise. The next day's mail brought orders for him to go and act elsewhere for a senior on two months' leave.
Dr. Pringle was not sorry. How could you collaborate properly with a man who calmly admitted that at a pinch he had used a bullet-mould to extract a tooth?
The monsoon had long since broken in the plains ere the young doctor returned; but in the arid tract in which Fort Lawrence lay rain came seldom at any time. And that was a year of abnormal drought. The fissures in the mud seemed to widen with the heat, and the fringe of green oleanders which followed every turn of the dry watercourse, mutely witnessing to unseen moisture below, wilted and drooped. In the new-built fort itself a crack or two showed in the level platform jutting out across the low valley on which the building stood, and in more than one place portions of the low mud-cliffs crumbled and broke away. The whole earth, indeed, seemed agape with thirst.
But water in plenty came at last. On the very day, in fact, when Terence O'Brien returned to the fort, which he reached on foot, having had to leave his dhooli behind, owing to a small slip on the road; nevertheless, as he crossed over from the mess to his quarters close to the hospital that evening, he told himself that he had the devil's own luck to be there at all. For the rain was then hitting the hard ground with a distinct thud, and spurting up from it in spray, showing white against the black mirk of the night. And the rush of the stream filling up the dry bed of the watercourse, and playing marbles with the boulders, was like a lion's roar.
It did not keep him awake, however, for he was dead tired. So he slept the sleep of the just. For how long he did not know. It was darker than ever when he woke suddenly--why he knew not, and with the same blind instinct was out into the open, quick as he could grope his way.
Not an instant too soon, either. A deafening crash told him that, though he could not see his own hand. The rain had ceased, but the rush of the river dulled hearing to all lesser sounds. As he stood dazed, he staggered, slipped, almost fell. Was that an earthquake, or was the solid ground parting somewhere close at hand? And if his house was down, how about the hospital and the sick folk?
He turned at the thought and ran till, in the dark and the silence of that overwhelming roar, he came full tilt upon some one else running in the dark also. It was the Surgeon-Major.
"The hospital's down. Have you a light--anything--a match?" panted Dr. Pringle. "We must have a light to see--"
"Oh, masâl! Oh, masâl-jee!" (Oh, the torch! Oh, the torch-bearer!) shouted Terence at the top of his voice as he ran on till stopped by something blocking the way. Ruins! And that was the sound of voices.
"What's up?" he cried.
"Don' know, sir," came from unseen hearers. "Part o' the 'orspital's down, but we can't see. It's a slide o' some sort, for there's a crack right across nigh under our feet. If we could get a light!"
"Oh, masâl! Oh, masâl-jee!" The doctor's voice rang out again towards the camp-followers' lines, but the roar was deafening. And in the night, when all men are asleep, the news of disaster travels slowly. Yet without a light it was impossible even to realise what had happened, still less to help the sick who might lie crushed.
"Oh, masâl! Oh, masâl-jee!--thank God! there's a light at last."
There was, in the far distance across the quadrangle. But it was not a torch; it was only an officer in a gorgeous sleeping-suit running with a bedroom candle. Still it was a light!
"Come on, man!" shouted Terence O'Brien, as it slackened speed, paused, stopped dead. His was the only voice that seemed to carry through the roar.
But the gay sleeping-suit stood still, waving its candle.
"It's the crack, sir," called some one in Terence O'Brien's ear. "It goes right across, I expect--we'd best find out first."
It did. A yawning fissure, twenty feet wide, had cut the hospital compound in two, and isolated one angle of the fort--that nearest the river--from the rest. Twenty feet wide, at least, judged by the glimmer of light! And how deep? Had the river cut it? Was it only a matter of time when the mud island on which they stood should be swept away? And what were the means of escape? There was more light now; more bedroom candles and sleeping-suits; a lamp or two, and others behind, as the boys--last to wake--came running, to pause like the first-comers, at the unpassable gulf; for the more it could be seen, the more difficult seemed the task of crossing it at once. By-and-by, perhaps, with ladders and ropes it would be possible--but now? Terence O'Brien, feeling the "now" imperative, skirted the crumbling edge almost too near for safety in his eagerness to find some foothold for a daring man; but there was none. True, the brick wall, built to strengthen the cracked mud one, still bridged the extreme end of the fissure, looking as if the mud had deliberately shrunk from its intrusion. It hung there half seen, on God knows what slender foundation--perhaps on none. But it could give no help. To trust it would be madness; a touch might send it down into the river below. No! Since none could cross the gap there must be more light on the farther side; torches, a bonfire, anything to pierce the dark and let men see how to help themselves and other men!
"Oh, masâl! Oh, masâl-jee-ân!" The cry went out with all the force of his lungs. Surely the camp-followers must be awake by now.
One was, at any rate; for, surrounded by a halo from the faggot of blazing pitch-pine it carried, a figure showed upon the path worn, close to the mud walls of the native quarters, by the foot-tracks of those whose duty took them to the hospital. It was the shâhbâsh wallah, coming slowly, almost indifferently, in answer to the call; coming as if to his ordinary duty towards the growing fringe of ineffectual candles and eager men bordering the impossible. That was better! Given half-a-dozen more such haloes--and there were plenty if they would only come--and eager men on the other side would see how to help themselves and their comrades!
But no other halo appeared behind the one which followed the foot-track of others so closely; and so once again the call was given--
"Oh, masâl! Oh, masâl-jee-ân! Oh, masâl! Oh, masâl-jee!"
"Hâzr, Huzoor!" (Present, sir).
The nearness of the voice made Terence O'Brien look up, for it was the first voice he had heard clearly from the other side against that roar of the river. But as he looked another voice beside him said hurriedly--
"My God! he's coming across!"
He was. Surrounded by the halo of his own light, and keeping religiously to the beaten path, the shâhbâsh wallah, leaving the mud wall of the quarters, had struck the outer brick one as it stood, supported for a few yards by a spit of earth upon which the foot-track showed as the light passed. A spit narrowing to nothing--no! not to nothing, but to a mere ledge of earth and mortar clinging like a swallow's nest to the brick--wider here, narrower there, yet still able to give faint foothold upon the traces of those feet which had passed and repassed so often to their trivial round, their common task. Foothold! Ay! But what of the brain guiding the feet? What of the courage guiding the brain?
And even then, what of the foundation?
A sort of murmur rose above the roar. "He can't do it--impossible--tell him. Call to him, O'Brien. Tell him not to try."
The doctor stood for one second watching the figure centring its circle of light against the background of wall; then, even though there was no need for it, his voice fell to a whisper. "Hush!" he said. "Don't hustle him. By the Lord who made me, he doesn't know; he's feeling his way every inch by the wall! He's blind, and by God! if anybody can do it, he will."
He did. Step by step, slowly, confidently, in the footsteps of others.
And the great cry of "Bravo, brother, bravo!" which went up from both sides of the gap as he and his torch stepped on to firm ground, brought him as much surprise as a voice from heaven might have done.
* * * * *
"Pressure on the brain!" said Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, about three weeks after this, when he and Dr. Pringle had had a consultation over the shâhbâsh wallah. He was not only blind now, but there was a drag in the good leg as he limped about, over which both doctors shook their heads. "And there's nothing to be done that I can see. The bhoys will miss him!"
That was true. Alley Taw had come into favour since the night when, as Terence phrased it, "he had done a brave deed without doing it," and by failing to see the evil, had enabled other men to do good. For the torch had not disclosed irretrievable disaster, and by timely rescue not a life had been lost.
Surgeon-Major Pringle frowned. He was beginning to understand his India a little, but the idea of the shâhbâsh wallah being a useful member of society was still as a red rag to a bull. And so, out of sheer contrariety, he began to talk doctor's talk as to the possibility of this or that.
"It's life or death, annyhow," said the junior, shaking his head, "but I don't see it. I wouldn't thry it myself--not now at any rate."
Perhaps not then. But after a month or two more he said, "It's your suggestion; I don't belave it can be done; but you may as well thry."
For the shâhbâsh wallah, half paralysed, had even given up his cry. So, part of the hospital being still under repair, they took him to the pink post-mortem house and set all the doors and windows wide for more light. He was quite unconscious by that time, so Terence O'Brien only had the chloroform handy, and kept his finger on the pulse. Half-a-dozen or more of the boys were on the mud steps over against the hospital compound waiting to hear the shâhbâsh wallah's fate. But you might have heard a pin drop in the post-mortem, save for the occasional quick request for this or that as the Surgeon-Major, with the Surgeon-Captain's eyes watching him, set his whole soul and heart and brain on doing something that had never been done before.
So the minutes passed. Was it to be failure or success? The Surgeon-Major's fingers were deft--none defter.
The minutes passed to hours. That which had to be done had to be done with one touch light as a feather, steady as a rock, perfect in its performance, or not at all.
And still the minutes passed. Terence O'Brien's face was losing some of its eagerness in sympathy, Dr. Pringle's gaining it in anxiety; for clear, insistent, not-to-be-silenced doubt was making itself heard. Only the shâhbâsh wallah cared not at all as he lay like a corpse.
It had come to the last chance. The last; and Dr. Pringle, with a pulse of wild resentment at his own weakness, realised that his nerve was going, his hand shaking. Still, it had to be done. The splinter of bone raised--the whole process he had thought out as the last chance gone through. He steadied himself and began. Failure or success? Failure--failure--failure! The word beat in on his heart and brain, bringing unsteadiness to both.
"Dresser, the chloroform," said Terence O'Brien, sharply; for there was a quiver in the man's eyelids.
But ere the deadening drug did its work, the shâhbâsh wallah's brain, set free to work along familiar lines by the raising of that splintered bone, had sent its old message to his lips--
"Shâhbâsh, bhaiyan, shâhbâsh!"
In telling the story Dr. Pringle says no more; generally because he cannot.
But after a time, if you are a brother craftsman, he will give you all details of the biggest and most successful operation he ever did.
And though he is slow to allow the corollary, he never denies that the shâhbâsh wallah's verdict put courage into him.
[THE MOST NAILING BAD SHOT IN CREATION]
This again is one of poor Craddock's stories which he told me when we were stretching a steel-edged ribbon of rail across shifting sandhills; that ribbon uniting West to East on which, a few years later, he met his death in trying to rid the permanent-way of something which Fate had decreed should be permanently in the way.
It happened in mutiny time; shortly after his appearance down the King's Well, which is told elsewhere. He was serving as a volunteer in one of the breastworks which, as the long hot-weather months dragged by, began to seam and sear the face of the red rocks on the Ridge at Delhi; creeping nearer and nearer to the red face of the city wall.
And with him, as the catch phrase runs, "lay" Joe Banks, the Yorkshireman; tall, stolid, silent. Good-looking also, with a thick close crop of curly brown hair and hard, honest blue eyes. He was not stupid by any means; only phenomenally silent, except when the talk turned on women, and then, as Craddock put it tersely, he "damned free"; perhaps because, as the latter worthy used to add with a suspicion of sympathy in his drink-blurred face, he had "cared a sight deal too much for one woman to 'ave much likin' left for the lot."
To one side of the breastwork lay a dry ravine where every day the vipers used to sun themselves on the hot red rocks. Just across it, within range, rose a small Mahomedan shrine amid sparse brushwood, which thickened a bit till it was barred by the ruined wall of a garden where the slow oxen circled round the well, sending runnels of slippery-looking water to the scented shade of citrons, roses, and mangoes, heedless of the great cannon-balls which sometimes came trundling, like playthings, down the wide walks. Not often, though, for the stress of strife lay at the other angle of the breastwork which faced the city wall.
Still, those who came to smoke a hard-earned pipe in what was the safest spot in the outpost, soon found that the pious-looking shrine, the peaceful garden, were not always so innocent as they looked. In the dusk of dark or dawn they were tenanted by what, after a time, the men agreed to call the "most nailin' bad shot in creation." "The direction wasn't, so to speak, so bad, sir," Craddock used to explain to me. "'E'd about 'ave 'it the sea-serpent for length; it was the elevation which, as Bull's-eyes said, savin' your presence, sir, was d----ficient. The top o' the Monument was about in it, sir, an' that was why the only feller as really use langwidge was Joe Banks; for 'e was a 'ead and shoulders higher than the lot o' us." So when, in the dark, a flash used to glimmer for a second among the brushwood like a firefly, the men learnt to sing out, "That's for you, Joey," "Duck, my darlin', duck," and other witticisms of that kind, until the big Yorkshireman's face darkened beyond jesting-point: for he had the devil's own temper when roused. It was this, joined to his extreme good looks and a somewhat hazy recollection of the Bible and the classics among the volunteers, which earned him the nickname of Apollyon. So to soothe him, some of the wilder spirits would organise a charge over the ravine, scattering, perhaps, a few drowsy adders which had forgotten to go to bed; but nothing else. The blind old fakeer in the shrine was always fast asleep, the bullocks in the garden circling slowly, driven by a drowsy lad curled up behind them.
So the days passed; and, despite practice, the Most Nailin' Bad Shot shot badly as ever. The odds, however, as the men pointed out gravely to Apollyon, kept on improving; so that sooner or later there must be a "casualty" in the garrison of Number One outpost. Joey, too, would get careless; he wouldn't smart enough, etc., etc. And, sure enough, one evening just as the moonlight was mixing with the daylight, and Joey Banks had risen to his full height in a huff because Craddock for once had sided against him in the perennial argument as to whether it was worth while fighting for women who didn't know what they would be at, and hadn't the pluck of a mouse, one of these firefly flashes was followed by a sudden clapping of the giant's hands to the very crown of his head.
"We looked, sir," Craddock used to say gravely, with that reminiscent biblical knowledge of his which had doubtless supplied Apollyon, "for 'im to fall dead; as 'e deserve rich; for 'e'd been damnin' uncommon free, sir. But 'e only use it worse. And then, savin' your presence, sir, we see that 'e'd 'ad, so ter speak, a narrer-gauge line laid down thro' 'is jungle--right through 'is curls, sir. Lordy! 'ow we laughed. It was a lady, we told 'im, as wanted some locks an' no mistake. It sorter made 'im mad, for 'e just stooped and gathered the lot--bein' fair, you could see it shinin' in the dust--together.
"'She shall 'ave 'em, never fear,' 'e says, quiet like. 'Yes! the person who fired that shot shall 'ave more o' my 'air than he reckons for.'"
Just at that moment, however, one of those sudden alarms which for three months kept the men and officers before Delhi on the alert by day and night broke up the company, and so Joe Banks' loss passed out of most minds. Except his own, of course. It lingered there, aided by that narrow gauge over his brain on which the cool night wind blew pleasantly.
So when the alarm passed, instead of coming back to rest, he crept out surreptitiously by the back of the breastwork, for such sorties were strictly out of order, and so by a slant downwards across the ravine. It was a brilliant moonlight night, and he caught the sparkle of many a deadly pair of eyes among the rocks. But he was in no mood to step aside from any danger, and once beyond fear of recall he strode along straight as if the whole place belonged to him; it might have, for all the opposition he met. The fakeer was asleep as usual, the oxen circling round the well, and in the scented shade of the roses and citrons he could find nothing save some drowsy birds who fluttered and twittered helplessly as his tall head forced a way through the thickets.
Feeling ill-used, he set his face back towards the breastwork, until the extraordinary peace of the moonlit scene, which, as Craddock asserted, used in the interval of onslaught to make the beleaguered city look like the New Jerusalem, brought him to a standstill; first to look, then to take out his pipe; finally to sit on a rock and think vaguely of the Yorkshire wolds and of some one, no doubt, who had not had the courage of her convictions, for after a bit he murmured, "She were a raight down coward, that's where it is, aw'm thinkin'."
He had not much time for reflection, however, for at that moment there was a flash, a crack, and something whizzed past his left ear. The Most Nailin' Bad Shot was better at close quarters. His blood was up in a second, and without pausing to pick up his musket, which he had laid aside, he was off to the spot whence the flash had come. And there! whoop forward! gone away! was his quarry for sure, running like a hare for some hiding-place, no doubt, among the rocks. It might have been reached, for romance tells of many secret passages between palaces inside the city and gardens without, but for a true lover's knot of viper which refused to budge from the path; which made the flying figure give a screech, and the flying feet, in their effort to overleap it, miss footing and fall.
The next instant Joe Banks was on it as it lay, and conscious even in his hurry that what he gripped was something young and soft--a boy, no doubt--devil's spawn.
"Aw'm goān ter choak ye on t' hair," he said grimly. "Open yer domed mouth, d'ye hear?"
It was almost as if the prostrate figure understood; but the next instant a set of gleaming white teeth had closed like a squirrel's round Joe Banks' first finger. He let off an echoing yell to the previous screech, and an oddly satisfied smile came to the fierce little face he could scarcely see for his big hand. It was an oval face, smooth as a girl's.
"That's nowt to Joey Banks, lad, he can kill anoother waay," he growled savagely, as he shifted a knee to press his prisoner down, loosened his left hand, his right being detained, and deliberately drew out one of the many knives stuck in his enemy's waistband. "Aw'll lay t' hair abun tha' heaart, tha' wrigglin' worm, and driv it hoām--that aw wull."
In pursuance of which plan, he undid an embroidered satin waistcoat, and began to push aside an inner muslin vest. A whiff of musk and roses mingled with the moonlight.
"Stinks and bites like a foumart," he muttered. "Soa lie thee still, will tha? an' tak' that to thissen ma--gor amoighty!"
Joe Banks was on his feet; so was his enemy. Both dazed, uncertain. Flight seemed to come uppermost to the latter's thought, when the big man suddenly laughed a low chuckle of sheer amusement.
"An' t' coom like a wild cat at Joey Banks--that caps owt!"
The next instant he was grappling with a whirlwind of knives and nails, anything.
"Woa! woa! ma lass! Hands off, tha little vixen, till a' git a look at tha!" he said soothingly, as he prisoned two small hands in one huge fist, and with the other held his adversary almost tenderly at arm's length. What he saw, as he afterwards described it to Craddock, was just a "moit o' pistols an' pouches."
"Well! well! Aw'm,--aw'm jiggered!" he exclaimed at last; adding argumentatively, "Whatten iver mad tha' go fur t' do it, tha foolish lass?"
Something in his broad, not unkindly rebuke seemed to take the starch out of the Most Nailin' Bad Shot. It seemed to cower in on itself and become smaller; though, as Joe Banks told himself perplexedly, it had been small enough to begin with.
"Well, aw am jiggered," he repeated more softly. "Whatten iver mad tha' do it, ma lass?"
The answer was feminine and disconcerting; a sudden storm of tears. So they stood, the quaintest couple in the world. She bristling with cold steel of sorts; he bareheaded in the moonlight, with nothing but his hands for weapons.
"Dunnot," he said soothingly, not without a certain trepidation. "Aw'm noān goān t' hurt thee, ma gell. We'm not thaat soort t' womenkind; an' tha's a main pratty gell." Here he laughed softly; a laugh that was lost in a third--
"Wall, aw'm jiggered."
He appeared to be so, for he ceased thrusting her from him--she being, indeed, too much engaged with tears to make it dangerous--and passed his hand over his forehead as if to clear his brain.
"Aw'm noān goān t' hurt tha, ma lass," he repeated suddenly, as if for his own information. "Aw'm nobbut goān t' shame tha' fur tha' badness."
And with that he lifted her right up like a baby, sate down on a neighbouring rock, and set her on his knee.
"Thou'rt as light as a feather," he said almost admiringly. "An' t' coom at Jooey Banks like a wild cat; for sure it caps owt; but thou'rt a bad gell, an' mun be shamed. So set tha still an' be doon wi' it."
Once more he might have claimed comprehension, for the Most Nailin' Bad Shot sate still; with the half-wicked, half-frightened look of a curious squirrel, as one by one he transferred knives and pistols to his own person. It was rather a lengthy business by reason of his right hand--the one that had been bitten--being still occupied in prisoning hers. Not that she struggled; on the contrary, she sate curiously still, checking even her sobs.
"Now for t' hair," he went on methodically, pulling off the large green turban wound around the small head. He sate half perturbed and breathless after this was done, and the half-wicked, half-frightened dark eyes watching him, seemed to admit a faint smile.
"Whew-w-w," he said under his breath, "it's long, for sartin sure." It was, and a faint scent of orange-blossom assailed him as he loosed the plaits. His hand trembled among them a little, and lingered.
"Aw mun be as good's ma word," he muttered, "as Joey Banks' word. See tha here--sit tha still, there's a good lass, an' let me hurry up; wilt thee?" There was almost an appeal in his voice, and both hands shook a little as the long black tresses twined themselves about the big fingers like snakes.
"Aw'm noān goān t' hurt," he reiterated blandly; when, perhaps fortunately, the whole bewildering face before him relapsed into a mischievous smile, and one small finger pointed derisively to the crown of his head. He flushed up scarlet.
"Thee'm nobbut a wicked, bad gell," he said fiercely, "an' Joey Banks'll shame tha--a bold hussy." So he set her on her feet, and attacked her last bit of masculinity. This was a long, green waistband wound about her middle, and which had carried a score or so of pistols, yataghans, and Heaven knows what murderous weapons. Of this portion of the toilette Craddock said it was hard to get Joey Banks to speak at all, and when he did, his voice dropped to a whisper, and he looked positively scared. She was so main slender, he said, that he thought he would never have done unwinding, though after a bit she helped cheerfully by twiddling like a teetotum. At last, however, she stood there, slim, girlish, her long hair shimmering, her dark eyes shining, half with tears, half with smiles.
"'An' then, Joey?' I arst 'im, sir, when 'e sate mumchance," Craddock interpolated.
"Aw out wi' 'Fower angels rouand ma bed,' man, an' a' up wi' her in ma arms, an' a' kissed her fair an' oft, man, fair an' oft, just t' shame her, an' a' runned awaay. That's what a' did--aw runned awaay."
Half-way across the ravine, however, he paused to pick up his musket and look back. The Most Nailin' Bad Shot in creation was standing where he had left her, her face hidden in her hands. For an instant something tore at his heart, bidding him go back; then he set his teeth with an oath, and ran on. Five minutes afterwards he had slipped into a favourite cranny of rock beside Craddock and was puffing away at his pipe as if nothing had happened, absolutely silent, till, according to the latter's report, he "give a silly sort of laugh," and in the moonlight his eyes could be seen shining like stars as he turned and said softly--
"Well, lad--a' ha' dune it this toime."
"Done what, Apollyon?" asked Craddock.
"A' dunnot roightly kna', but a' ha' dune it, for sartin sure," replied Joe Banks, succinctly; and then he told the story.
"One of them gazes[[1]] as they call 'em," interrupted Craddock, when the big man told of his discovery in a sort of hushed voice. "They makes 'em male an' female--the latter most wicious. Bad lots out o' the bazaar, needin' a passport to the skies--or the devil."
Joey Banks' big fist came down like a sledgehammer on Craddock's knee.
"Hush, mon!" he said peremptorily. "She woan't none that sort. When a' kissed her--" he stopped short, and blushed furiously.
"Apollyon!" remarked Craddock, after a pause, with great severity. "It ain't wholesome to keep sech things comfortable in yer own buzzum. It's better to 'ave up an' done with it an' begin agin. When you kiss her--w'ot then?"
But Joe Banks' shining eyes were looking out into the soft darkness, soft and dark for all their shininess. "A' meant to 'a' keppen coont--but a' didn't somehow." His voice was quite dreamy, and Craddock rose in wrath.
"It's my belief, same as I was in the catechising, Joey Banks, that you bin an' fallen in love with a female gaze; but mark my word--there ain't no gratitoode to speak of in gazes, and she'll nick you yet, sure as my name's Nathaniel James. She'll nick you yet, I du assure you."
But Craddock was wrong. Whatever else she did, the Most Nailin' Bad Shot shot no more. Not that it mattered much to Joey Banks whether she did or not, since but a few days after there was a "casoolty" in Number One outpost, Volunteer Joseph Banks, sometime canal overseer, was reported missing after a sortie; but as he had been last seen mortally wounded close to the city wall, his comrades mourned Apollyon from the first as dead. So as Craddock said feelingly, "there weren't even a lock o' 'is 'air for 'is old mother, an' she was a widder."
Not that there was much time for mourning in the outpost, since the long months of the siege were drawing to a close. Then came the final assault, the ten days of struggle within the city, until even the Palace was ours, and the army which had taken it prepared to move on elsewhere. It was the evening before the start, and Craddock, who, as a volunteer, had more liberty to go and come as he chose, went down to the now deserted outpost to smoke a last pipe, and think over the past with the pleasing melancholy which goes so admirably with tobacco.
"Poor Joey Banks!" he thought, as memory came round to that episode, "'im an' 'is female gaze. I shan't never forget 'em."
I will tell the rest in Craddock's own words; they suit it.
"I look up, sir, an' you might 'ave knock me over with a ninepin, for there was Joey, lookin' as spry as spry. 'Joey,' says I, takin' it as one does, sir, for all them sayin's of ninepins and feathers and such like, quite calm, 'so you're not dead?'
"'Na! lad,' he says back, as calm like. 'Aw'm goān t' be married, an' a've coom t' get t' best man.'
"It took me all of a 'eap, sir, sorter Malachi an' the minor prophets, sir, as things does sometimes. 'Joey, my boy,' I says, 'you ain't never goin' to marry a female gaze?' says I.
"But 'e was, sir. Ter cut a long story short, she'd found 'im an' nursed him. An' we all knows wot that means, white or black, sir. 'E'd a 'eap to tell--though Lord knows where 'e got it, for 'e didn't know no 'Industani to speak of, sir--about 'ow she lived in quite a fine 'ouse an' 'ow her father an' brothers 'ad bin killed, so as she kinder 'adn't no choice but gazing. But I wasn't to be took with chaff, so I says to 'im quite solemn like, 'Afore I'm best man, I've got to know, Joey--is she square?' 'E just looked at me, sir, as if I were slush.
"'She'd gotten ma hair in t' buzzum,' he said, an' said no moor.
"So I gave my word to be best man, sir, an' 'e sighed like as a weight was took off him. 'Then coom awa' wi' me t' passon,' says 'e, 'fur I'm goān t' be marrid afoor aw goes with t' army to-morer.'
"'Then you've 'ad the banns cried,' says I, for my father bein' bell-ringer same as give me my name in 'oly baptism, sir, I was up to them dodges. 'E give me a real Apollyon frown, sir.
"'Na, lad; aw've noān had nought cried, but aw'm goān t' wed her fair afoor a' fight, so save t' breath an' coom t' passon.'
"Well, sir, parson wasn't a bad chap, as I knowed, 'aving seen 'im doing dooty stiddily like the rest o' us, but 'e'd got 'is black coat on agin, an' 'e were by nature, the canonised red bricky sort; so 'e wouldn't none o' it, though I stood solemn for Joe like as if I bin godfather, tellin' 'im 'ow Joe would 'ave bin a deader but for 'er, an' 'ow she was willin' to become a Christian in 'oly baptism wen she 'ad a chanst, an' 'ow Joe wouldn't never 'ave bin in a 'urry without bridesmaids but for bein' that eager to fight 'is country's foes agin--for of course, sir, 'e 'adn't 'ad a look in at anythin' but beef-tea an' barley water till we took the city.
"'Why doesn't he wait decently till he comes back?' says parson. 'The sacrament of marriage is not a responsibility to be entered into unawares, my good--'
"Joe rose up--Lord bless you!--two 'eads taller nor parson. 'Coom awa'! best man,' 'e says. 'It's waaste toime heere, an' aw'll need tha at t' mosque; passon theer ar'n't so scrumfumptious, an' she towt ma t' Kulma this marnin' foor fear'--that's their creed, sir, same as the Gazes, male an' female, yell when they're a stickin' of you.
"Well parson 'e brought up sharp at this an' said, 'Stay a bit.' Then 'e look at Joe, an' Joe look at 'im.
"'Tha see she's gotten t' be ma wife, man,' said Joe apologetic like, an' parson 'e push 'is red bricky prayer-book away fretful.
"'But I don't know anything,' he said. 'I don't even know if she is a spinster or a widow. Will you swear she hasn't a husband living?'
"Well, sir, Joe looked at parson, and then 'e looked at me, an' then 'e scratch 'is 'ead--the curls 'ad grown tight as ever, sir--an' then sudden 'e smile--one o' them smiles like the sun on a daisy, sir.
"' Aw dunnot rightly knaw,' says 'e, 'aw nivver arst her,' an' parson 'e look at me an' at 'im and at the solemnisation o' 'oly matrimony as 'f 'e didn't know which was which.
"Well, the end o' it was that the three o' us went down to one o' them light an' shady open-air houses with a tree growin' out o' a wall, and a lot o' pigeons. Parson 'e stood in one o' the arches raise up a step or two, an' they stood in the space below, right in the sun, an' I stood 'twixt an' between, for you see, sir, I was clerk as well as best man.
"'Will you take this woman to be thy wedded wife?' arst parson.
"'Such is my desire,' says I, in order; but Joe Banks wouldn't none o' that.
"'Fur better fur worse,' 'e says, 'fur richer fur poorer, domed if a' doan't.'
"So 'e was wedded to the Most Nailin' Bad Shot in creation."
"And was she pretty?" I asked of Craddock.
He shook his head. "I niver set eyes on her, sir, though I was best man. She was wrap up in a white veil, an' 'e kep' her so--said she liked it--they does, sir, when they've got a good 'usband."
"So they lived happy ever after?"
"Not for long, sir--" here Craddock slipped his hands into his pockets as the first step towards slouching off. "That sort o' thing don't somehow last long, sir," here his eyes caught the gold of the setting sun, as they had a trick of doing when they grew soft. "Seems to me--savin' your presence, sir--as if there was too much o' the Noo Jerewsalem about that sort o' thing fur this world; that's 'ow it is. She died, sir, a few years after, when 'e was back in the Canals, in a God-forsaken spot, where there wasn't no one to--to be best man like. An' so they found 'im lying beside 'er with a bullet in 'is brain. So I was a minor prophet after all, an' Joey Banks got nicked at last by the Most Nailin' Bad Shot in creation."
[THE REFORMER'S WIFE]
A SKETCH FROM LIFE
He was a dreamer of dreams, with the look in his large dark eyes, which Botticelli put into the eyes of his Moses; that Moses in doublet and hose, whose figure, isolated from its surroundings, reminds one irresistibly of Christopher Columbus, or Vasco da Gama--of those, in fact, who dream of a Promised Land.
And this man dreamt as wild a dream as any. He hoped, before he died, to change the social customs of India.
He used to sit in my drawing-room, talking to me by the hour of the Prophet and his blessed Fâtma--for he was a Mahomedan--and bewailing the sad degeneracy of these present days, when caste had crept into and defiled the Faith. I shall never forget the face of martyred enthusiasm with which he received my first invitation to dinner. He accepted it, as he would have accepted the stake, with fervour, and indeed to his ignorance the ordeal was supreme. However, he appeared punctual to the moment on the appointed day, and greatly relieved my mind by partaking twice of plum-pudding, which he declared to be a surpassingly cool and most digestible form of nourishment, calculated to soothe both body and mind. Though this is hardly the character usually assigned to it, I did not contradict him, for not even his eager self-sacrifice had sufficed for the soup, the fish, or the joint, and he might otherwise have left the table in a starving condition. As it was, he firmly set aside my invitation to drink water after the meal was over, with the modest remark that he had not eaten enough to warrant the indulgence.
The event caused quite a stir in that far-away little town, set out among the ruins of a great city, on the high bank of one of the Punjab rivers; for the scene of this sketch lay out of the beaten track, beyond the reach of babus and barristers, patent-leather shoes and progress. Beyond the pale of civilisation altogether, among a quaint little colony of fighting Pathans who still pointed with pride to an old gate or two which had withstood siege after siege, in those old fighting days when the river had flowed beneath the walls of the city. Since then the water had ebbed seven miles to the south-east, taking with it the prestige of the stronghold, which only remained a picturesque survival; a cluster of four-storeyed purple-brick houses surrounded by an intermittent purple-brick wall, bastioned and loop-holed. A formidable defence, while it lasted. But it had a trick of dissolving meekly into a sort of mud hedge, in order to gain the next stately fragment, or maybe to effect an alliance with one of the frowning gateways which had defied assault. This condition of things was a source of sincere delight to my Reformer Futteh Deen (Victory of Faith) who revelled in similes. It was typical of the irrational, illogical position of the inhabitants in regard to a thousand religious and social questions, and just as one brave man could break through these sham fortifications, so one resolute example would suffice to capture the citadel of prejudice, and plant the banner of abstract Truth on its topmost pinnacle.
For he dreamt excellently well, and as he sate declaiming his Persian and Arabic periods in the drawing-room with his eyes half shut, like one in presence of some dazzling light, I used to feel as if something might indeed be done to make the Mill of God grind a little faster.
In the matter of dining out, indeed, it seemed as if he was right. For within a week of his desperate plunge, I received an invitation to break bread with the municipal committee in the upper storey of the Vice-President's house. The request, which was emblazoned in gold, engrossed on silk paper in red and black, and enclosed in a brocade envelope, was signed by the eleven members and the Reformer; who, by the way, edited a ridiculous little magazine to which the committee subscribed a few rupees a month. Solely for the purpose of being able to send copies to their friends at court, and show that they were in the van of progress. For a man must be that, who is patron of a "Society for the General Good of All Men in All Countries." I was, I confess it, surprised, even though a casual remark that now perhaps his Honour the Lieutenant-Governor would no longer suspect his slaves of disloyalty, showed me that philanthropy had begun at home. For the little colony bore a doubtful character, being largely leavened by the new Puritanism, which Government, for reasons best known to itself, chooses to confound with Wahabeeism.
The entertainment given on the roof amid starshine and catherine-wheels proved a magnificent success, its great feature being an enormous plum-pudding which I was gravely told had been prepared by my own cook. At what cost, I shudder to think; but the rascal's grinning face as he placed it on the table convinced me that he had seized the opportunity for some almost inconceivable extortion. But there was no regret in those twelve grave, bearded faces, as one by one they tasted and approved. All this happened long before a miserable, exotic imitation of an English vestry replaced the old patrician committees, and these men were representatives of the bluest blood in the neighbourhood, many of them descendants of those who in past times had held high offices of state, and had transmitted courtly manners to their children. So the epithets bestowed on the plum-pudding were many-syllabled; but the consensus of opinion was indubitably towards its coolness, its digestibility, and its evident property of soothing the body and the mind. Again I did not deny it. How could I, out on the roof under the eternal stars, with those twelve foreign faces showing, for once, a common bond of union with the Feringhee? I should have felt like Judas Iscariot if I had struck the thirteenth chord of denial.
The Reformer made a speech afterwards, I remember, in which, being wonderfully well read, he alluded to love-feasts and sacraments, and a coming millennium, when all nations of the world should meet at one table, and--well! not exactly eat plum-pudding together, but something very like it. Then we all shook hands, and a native musician played something on the siringhi which they informed me was "God Save the Queen." It may have been. I only know that the Reformer's thin face beamed with almost pitiful delight as he told me triumphantly that this was only the beginning.
He was right. From that time forth the plum-pudding feast became a recognised function. Not a week passed without one. Generally--for my gorge rose at the idea of my cook's extortion--in the summer-house in my garden, where I could have an excuse for providing the delicacy at my own expense. And I am bound to say that this increased intimacy bore other fruits than that contained in the pudding. For the matter of that it has continued to bear fruit, since I can truthfully date the beginning of my friendship for the people of India from the days when we ate plum-pudding together under the starshine.
The Reformer was radiant. He formed himself and his eleven into committees and subcommittees for every philanthropical object under the sun, and many an afternoon have I spent under the trees with my work watching one deputation after another retire behind the oleander hedge in order to permutate itself by deft rearrangement of members, secretaries, and vice-presidents into some fresh body bent on the regeneration of mankind. For life was leisureful, lingering and lagging along in the little town where there was neither doctor nor parson, policeman nor canal officer, nor in fact any white face save my own and my husband's. Still we went far and fast in a cheerful, unreal sort of way. We started schools and debating societies, public libraries and technical art classes. Finally we met enthusiastically over an extra-sized plum-pudding, and bound ourselves over to reduce the marriage expenditure of our daughters.
The Reformer grew more radiant than ever, and began in the drawing-room--where it appeared to me he hatched all his most daring schemes--to talk big about infant marriage, enforced widowhood, and the seclusion of women. The latter I considered to be the key to the whole position, and therefore I felt surprised at the evident reluctance with which he met my suggestion, that he should begin his struggle by bringing his wife to visit me. He had but one, although she was childless. This was partly, no doubt, in deference to his advanced theories; but also, at least so I judged from his conversation, because of his unbounded admiration for one who by his description was a pearl among women. In fact this unseen partner had from the first been held up to me as a refutation of all my strictures on the degradation of seclusion. So, to tell truth, I was quite anxious to see this paragon, and vexed at the constant ailments and absences which prevented our becoming acquainted. The more so because this shadow of hidden virtue fettered me in argument, for Futteh Deen was an eager patriot, full of enthusiasms for India and the Indians. Once the sham fortifications were scaled, he assured me that Hindustan, and above all its women, would come to the front and put the universe to shame. Yet, despite his successes, he looked haggard and anxious; at the time I thought it was too much progress and plum-pudding combined, but afterwards I came to the conclusion that his conscience was ill at ease, even then.
So the heat grew apace. The fly-catchers came to dart among the sirus flowers and skim round the massive dome of the old tomb in which we lived. The melons began to ripen, first by ones and twos, then in thousands--gold, and green, and russet. The corners of the streets were piled with them, and every man, woman, and child carried a crescent moon of melon at which they munched contentedly all day long. Now, even with the future good of humanity in view, I could not believe in the safety of a mixed diet of melon and plum-pudding, especially when cholera was flying about. Therefore, on the next committee-day I had a light and wholesome refection of sponge-cakes and jelly prepared for the philanthropists. They partook of it courteously, but sparingly. It was, they said, superexcellent, but of too heating and stimulating a nature to be consumed in quantities. In vain I assured them that it could be digested by the most delicate stomach; that it was, in short, a recognised food for convalescents. This only confirmed them in their view, for, according to the Yunâni system, an invalid diet must be heating, strengthening, stimulating. Somehow in the middle of their upside-down arguments I caught myself looking pitifully at the Reformer, and wondering at his temerity in tilting at the great mysterious mass of Eastern wisdom.
And that day, in deference to my Western zeal, he was to tilt wildly at the zenâna system.
His address fell flat, and for the first time I noticed a distinctly personal flavour in the discussion. Hitherto we had resolved and recorded gaily, as if we ourselves were disinterested spectators. However, the Vice-President apologised for the general tone, with a side slash at exciting causes in the jelly and sponge-cake, whereat the other ten wagged their heads sagely, remarking that it was marvellous, stupendous, to feel the blood running riot in their veins after those few mouthfuls. Verily such food partook of magic. Only the Reformer dissented, and ate a whole sponge-cake defiantly.
Even so the final Resolution ran thus: "That this committee views with alarm any attempt to force the natural growth of female freedom, which it holds to be strictly a matter for the individual wishes of the man." Indeed it was with difficulty that I, as secretary, avoided the disgrace of having to record the spiteful rider, "And that if any member wanted to unveil the ladies he could begin on his own wife."
I was young then in knowledge of Eastern ways, and consequently indignant. The Reformer, on the other hand, was strangely humble, and tried afterwards to evade the major point by eating another sponge-cake, and making a facetious remark about experiments and vile bodies; for he was a mine of quotations, especially from the Bible, which he used to wield to my great discomfiture.
But on the point at issue I knew he could scarcely go against his own convictions, so I pressed home his duty of taking the initiative. He agreed, gently. By-and-by, perhaps, when his wife was more fit for the ordeal. And it was natural, even the mem-sahiba must allow, for unaccustomed modesty to shrink. She was to the full as devoted as he to the good cause, but at the same time--Finally, the mem-sahiba must remember that women were women all over the world--even though occasionally one was to be found like the mem-sahiba capable of acting as secretary to innumerable committees without a blush. There was something so wistful in his eager blending of flattery and excuse that I yielded for the time, though determined in the end to carry my point.
With this purpose I reverted to plum-puddings once more, and, I fear, to gross bribery of all kinds in the shape of private interviews and soft words. Finally I succeeded in getting half the members to consent to sending their wives to an after-dark at-home in my drawing-room, provided always that Mir Futteh Deen, the Reformer, would set a good example.
He looked troubled when I told him, and pointed out that the responsibility for success or failure now lay virtually with him, yet he did not deny it.
I took elaborate precautions to ensure the most modest seclusion on the appointed evening, even to sending my husband up a ladder to the gallery at the very top of the dome to smoke his after-dinner cigar. I remember thinking how odd it must have looked to him perched up there to see the twinkling lights of the distant city over the soft shadows of the ferash trees, and at his feet the glimmer of the white screens set up to form a conventional zenân-khâna. But I waited in vain--in my best dress, by the way. No one came, though my ayah assured me that several jealously-guarded dhoolies arrived at the garden-gate and went away again when Mrs. Futteh Deen never turned up.
I was virtuously indignant with the offender, and the next time he came to see me sent out a message that I was otherwise engaged. I felt a little remorseful at having done so, however, when, committee-day coming round, the Reformer was reported on the sick-list. And there he remained until after the first rain had fallen, bringing with it the real Indian spring--the spring full of roses and jasmines, of which the poets and the bul-buls sing. By this time the novelty had worn off philanthropy and plum-pudding, so that often we had a difficulty in getting a quorum together to resolve anything; and I, personally, had begun to weary for the dazzled eyes and the eager voice so full of sanguine hope.
Therefore it gave me a pang to learn from the Vice-President, who, being a Government official, was a model of punctuality, that in all probability I should never hear or see either one or the other again. Futteh Deen was dying of the rapid decline which comes so often to the Indian student.
A recurrence of a vague remorse made me put my pride in my pocket and go unasked to the Reformer's house, but my decision came too late. He had died the morning of my visit, and I think I was glad of it.
For the paragon of beauty and virtue, of education and refinement, was a very ordinary woman, years older than my poor Reformer, marked with the small-pox, and blind of one eye. Then I understood.
[THE SQUARING OF THE GODS]
It was the night before the great Eclipse. A vast, vague expectancy brooded over the length and breadth of India. Of prophesying there had been no lack, for signs and wonders had been as blackberries in September.
So, far and near, east, west, south, and north, the people of Hindustan--many-hued, many-raced, many-faithed--were watching for they knew not what, watching with grave, silent, yet curious composure.
But there was no outward sign of this inward expectation on either side. The millions of dark faces behind which it lay were as inscrutable as the telegraph wires through which the mere fraction of white faces responsible for the safety of those millions of dark ones were flashing silent messages of warning and preparation.
And here, in the Sacred City, beside the Sacred River, in which multitudes of those millions hoped to bathe on the morrow during the fateful moments of the sun's eclipse, the dim curves of the world had never been outlined against a calmer, more restful sky--a sky almost black in its intensity of shadow. Yet the night was clear, full of a starlight that could be seen, which showed the bend of the broad river, angled on one side by the straight lines of its curved sequence of bathing-steps that swept away to the horizon on either side.
The steps themselves, shadowy, vague, were spangled as with stars by the little trembling lamps of the myriads on myriads of pilgrims already gathered on them waiting for the dawn. The reflection of these lamps lay in the water beside the reflection of the stars, making it hard to tell where heaven ended, where earth begun.
Behind this long length of bathing-steps--irregular in height, in slope, in everything save an inevitable crowning by the tall temple spires--lay Benares. Benares, the only city in the world--since the reputation of Rome lives by works as well as faith--whose every stone tells of that search after righteousness which lies so close to the heart of humanity. Benares, with its sunless alleys, full of the perfume of dead flowers and spent incense--alleys which thread their way past shrine after shrine, holy place after holy place; mere niches in a worn stone, perhaps, or less even than that; only the bare imprint of a bloody hand on the tall, blank walls of the crowded tenement houses which seem to narrow God's sky as they rise up toward it. Benares, where the alien master steps into the gutter to let a swinging corpse pass on its way to the Sacred River, but where the priest behind it--his dark forehead barred with white, or smeared with a bold patch of ochre--steps into the opposite gutter, and clings to the shrine-set wall like a limpet, lest he be defiled by a touch, a shadow. Benares, which is, briefly, the strangest, saddest city on God's earth.
It lay this night, far as the eye could reach along the outward curve of the Ganges, dreamful exceedingly, dimly paler than the sky. But on the other side of the river, where the land bulged into the stream, lay a scene as, dreamful; yet dreamful in a different way; for here, almost from the water's edge, the young green wheat stretched away into that level plain of India, the most densely populated agricultural country in the world, where myriads and myriads of men live content as the cattle with which they till the soil.
So a whole world lies between these two banks of the Ganges; between the men of whom pilgrims are made, and the pilgrims made of those men. And spanning them, joining them, aggressively, unsympathetically, is the railway bridge built by the alien "Bridge-builders."
Seen in the starlight, with its lattice of dark girders showing against the sky, its white piers blocking the water-slide at intervals, this bridge looked quaintly like a fell and monstrous hairy caterpillar out for a night-walking, one of those caterpillars with turreted excrescences at its former and its latter end. The hinder one here was clearly outlined against a distant block of greater darkness. This was a dense grove of mango trees; and through its far-off shadow shone twinkling coloured lights, while from it came fitfully, at the wind's caprice, a faint sound of drumming, a twangling of sitaras; for, in the shelter of the grove, some of the white faces who were responsible for the dark ones were in camp--in a pleasure-camp full of guests come to see the show, and whither the telegrams of warning flashed and whence the answers flashed back, even while the nautch, bidden to amuse those guests, went on and on in twanglings, drummings, screechings, posturings.
Such details, however, were hidden even from the nearest point of the angled curve of bathing-steps which swept right away to the starlit horizon on the opposite side of the river. The only movement visible thence by the waiting crowd, as it looked across the river, was a curious dazzling flicker, as if the bridge were shivering, which was caused by the continuous stream on its outer footway of arriving pilgrims, showing now against the dark girders, now against the paler sky.
"Mai Gunga hath her hands full!" murmured one of the group squatting immovable on these nearest steps; "they come, and come."
A face or two, patient, dark, turned to the bridge, and another voice came, calm, passive.
"Ay! 'tis easier for folk to find salvation with 'rails' and bridges than, as of old, with blistered feet and boats." A dark hand nearest the water's lip, as it lapped a lazy, silvery whisper on the worn stone steps, slid into the sacred flood with a sort of tentative caress.
"Yet they said She would revenge Herself for the rending of Her bosom, for the burden of bricks laid on Her; but She hath not. She gives and takes as ever."
The long, dark fingers gathered some of the fallen petals which the river was returning to those who had cast their flower-offering on its surface, and the dark eyes watched a white-swathed corpse that was drifting down stream, a faint streak in the slumbering shadow.
"True!" came another passive voice; "but the time is not past. There is to-morrow yet."
The absolutely unrepresentable chuck! made by the tongue against the roof of the mouth, which is the most emphatic denial of India, echoed suddenly, aggressively, into the peaceful air.
It came from the blackness of a low masonry abutment which, traversing the last three steps, projected a few feet into the river, like a pier. A yard maybe above the water, some three long, and perhaps a couple broad, there was just room on its outer end for a small square temple with a rude spiked spire--the plainest of temples, guiltless of ornament, looking out over the Ganges blankly. For its only aperture, a low arched doorway, faced the steps and showed now as a blot of utter darkness.
"Not She, brethren!" said a cracked voice following on the denial. "She or Her like will never harm the Huzoors! They have paid their toll, see you, they have squared the gods."
A dozen or more faces turned to the voice, the figures belonging to them remaining immovable, as if carved in stone.
"Dost think so really, Baha-jee?" came a question. "I have heard that tale before--and that 'tis done in the 'Magic-houses.'"[[2]]
The emphatic denial rose again. "Not so! These eyes saw it done--here, in this very place, forty years ago! here, at Mai Kâli's shrine!"
In the pause that followed, a pair of claw-like hands could be seen above the bar of shadow, wavering salaams to the little temple, in the perfunctory manner of priesthood all over the world.
"'Tis old Bishen, the flower-seller," said a yawning voice. "He was here in the Time of Trouble,[[3]] and he tells tales of it--when he remembers!"
"Then let him tell," yawned another, "since the night is long and the dawn lingers. How was't done, Baha-jee?"
There was a pause.
"Many ways, doubtless. Here and there different ways. But here, one way. Forty years ago, brothers! Yea, forty years ago, these eyes saw the 'squaring of the gods.' In this wise ..."
There was another dreamful pause, and then, from the shadow, came the old thin voice once more.
"Yonder, where the bridge stands now, was Broon-sahib's house--"
"Broon-sahib?" echoed a curious listener. "Dost mean Broon-sahib who built the bridge?"
"Who built the bridge?" hesitated the tale-teller. "God knows! More like his son; for the years pass--they pass, Mai Gunga! and I grow old. Grant me this last cleansing, Mother! Wash me from sin ere I go hence ..."
"Lo! thou hast made him forget the rest," reproved another listener, "as if there were not Broon-sahibs ever! Even now, here in Benares! Yes! Baba-jee, of a certainty, Broon-sahib's house stood here, where the bridge stands now."
The old memory, started afresh, went on.
"It was a boy, the child. A toddler, but with the temper of tigers. Lo! it would scream and yell in the ayah's arms, and beat her face to be let crawl down the steps to pull the spent bosses of the marigolds out of the water and fling them back like balls. A mite of a boy; white as jasmine in the face, yellow as the marigolds themselves in hair. The mem, its mother, had the like face and hair. I used to see her in the verandah over the river, and driving above the steps. There were many sahibs came and went to the house, after their fashion, and she smiled and spoke to them all. There was one of them--so young, he might have been a son almost--who came often; and she smiled on him, too, as he played, like a boy, with the child. He was one of the sahibs who have eyes; so, after a time, he would nod to me and say 'Râm! Râm!' with a laugh as he passed above me, sitting here in the shadow, selling my garlands.
"So, one day, as he came by, there was the baby screaming in its ayah's arms to be let crawl to the water, and she was denying it by the mem's orders. What the young sahib said at first I know not; but after a bit he came running down the steps, the child in his arms, calling back to the woman, in her tongue, 'Trouble not, ayah! I'll square it, never fear!'
"And there he was beside me, the two white faces, the yellow heads--for he was but a boy himself, slim, white, yellow-haired--close together, brother-like, buying a garland of the biggest marigolds I had. So down at the water's edge, he teaching the child how to throw them in like a thrower.
"'No underhand work, brotherling,' he said in our tongue, for the baby, after the fashion of the baba-logue, knew none other. 'So! straight from the shoulder. Bravo! Thou wilt play crickets, by-and-by, like a man.'
"After that once of chance, it came often of set purpose. He would come down from the house with the child, and I had to keep the biggest marigolds for the game, since, see you, they held the bits of brick better with which he weighted them.
"Thus it went on till one day all the sahibs and mems were at the house yonder, for God knows what amusement! and in the cool they strolled down here--the mems dressed so gay, the sahibs all black and smoking--to see how well the toddler, who could scarce speak, had learnt to throw. At least, so it seemed, for they watched and laughed; but after a time they took to throwing the flowers themselves, laughing more and jesting, until not a marigold was left. Then they began on Shivjee's dhatura blossoms, filling their white horns with pebbles, and hurling them far, far into the stream.
"So, when paying time came, the young sahib--he had the child by the hand--flung rupees into my empty basket, and said, 'Lo! Bishen'--for he was one of those who remember names--'those who seek to curry favour with the gods will have no chance to-day. We are beforehand. We have squared them.'
"At this the mem, standing close by, frowned and spoke some reproof; maybe because she was of those who drive to church often. But the boy only laughed, and, catching the child up, cried, 'Lo! brotherling, then are we sinners indeed; since we do it so often, you and I!'
"And with that he raced up the steps with the child, calling 'Râm, Râm!' and 'Jai Kâli Ma!' like any worshipper; so that the mem and the others strolling after could not but laugh. And some echoed the cry as they went up the steps."
The old voice paused in its even sing-song; and when it began again, there was a new note in it which seemed to bring a sense of hurry and stress even to that uttermost peace.
"But they came down again. How long after matters not. I see them so in my old eyes. Going up, laughing in the sunset, then returning. It was starlight when they came down, the mems and the sahibs and the baba-logue. Starlight as it was now, brethren, but not still, like this. There were cries, and flames yonder, and folk running.
"The boats lay here below the temple. And one--a Mahomedan--came with them, promising safety. So they begun to get into the boats, and one moved off, the crowd looking on. Then suddenly, God knows why! it ceased looking on, and began to kill. They were half in, half out of the boat; the sahib-logue and some cried to stop, some to go on. But the mems made no noise; only you could see their faces white out of the shadows.
"And his, the young sahib's, was whiter than any, glittering, it seemed, with a white fire. The mem was in the boat, and Broon-sahib on the bottom step, the baby in his arms. But he, the boy, was above him facing the crowd--making time.
"Then, just as the mem stretched her hands for the child, a bullet--they were firing from the top steps--hit Broon-sahib, and he fell half in, half out of the water, pushing the boat out in his fall. So it began to slide down stream.
"Some in it would have stopped it, but the mem gave a look at those other mems, those other babies, and laid her hand on one that would have gone back.
"'No!'
"That was the cry she gave--a great cry; but a greater one rang out through the shadows and the lights, from the boy who had caught up the child as it fell upon the steps.
"I know not what it was, but it was great, and it echoed out as the boat slipped fast to safety. And he held the child to his breast and waved his sword, so that the mem's white face rose from her hands, where she had hidden it, and she looked back. That was the last thing I saw out of the shadows as the boat slipped to safety; but it held me, so that when I looked round, the boy was no longer on the steps.
"He had leaped to the plinth of the temple, and his arms were empty of his burden. Only he stood in front of the doorway with his glittering white face--his glittering white face, his glittering white sword!
"' Come on, you devils!' he shouted in our tongue. 'Come on! Mai Kâli shall have blood to-night if she wants it.'"
"And she had, brothers!
"It ran from the plinth and trickled to the river; for none could touch him from behind, and his sword was in front.
"There was a method in its hackings and hewings. At least so it seemed to me, watching helpless for good or evil, from my place in the shadow. For ever, as its keenest stroke fell, so another body fell blocking the plinth, until he had to stand almost in the arch itself.
"Then a burly Mahomedan trooper challenged him, and I knew not which way the fight was going, till, with a shout that was almost a laugh, the white face and the white sword showed, lunging back at the big body as they broke past. And it fell sidelong, blocking the doorway quite.
"But none thought of that, of it. None thought of anything save the glittering face and the glittering sword that had burst through the circling crowd, and now, facing it again, was backing up the steps, fighting grimly as it backed.
"Up and up, step by step, and we--even I, brothers, watching helpless--drawn after it perforce, to see--to know ...
"So the steps were left silent in the starlight. I did not see the end, brothers. It was beyond my sight. They told me afterwards it was in the bazaar, with half the town to see; but I had crept away, a great shivering on me, for I had remembered the flowers and the young sahib's words about the gods.
"And I remembered the child. What had become of the child?
"Then suddenly I understood. Then I knew what the method of the sword had been--how it had hidden, had lured!
"It was nigh dawn when I remembered; dawn as it is now. Look! The iron of night's scabbard grows into the steel of day's sword upon the water; and hark! that is the cry of the mallards. The world is waking. So it was when I crept down to Kâli's shrine.
"The blood was still dripping into the water, and when I drew the dead mass of flesh from blocking the doorway, the red of it lay in a pool up to Her feet. But the child had crawled on Her knees, brothers, and had cried itself to sleep there.
"Yet when it wakened at my touch it did not cry, for, see you, it knew me; and so, when it saw the milk, set in a bowl before Her as offering, it stretched its hands for it.
"Thus it was made clear. So I gave it Mai Kâli's milk, knowing it was true what he had said, 'that they had squared the gods.'"
The voice paused, and another asked, "And then?" before it went on dreamily.
"Yea! it was true indeed, for ere the day ended they were back with guns and soldiers. So, since silence is better than speech when nought is sure, I crept in the night to a Colonel's house and left the child in the garden for them to find.
"Forty years ago, brothers! Forty years is it since the boats slipped down to safety with the Huzoors, and now ..."
There was a sudden stir in the waiting crowd.
A boat had slipped up the river shadows from the bridge and was making for the steps.
"That's your station, Brown," said an English voice; "the water is a bit deep about the shrine, remember, and the old women are devilish hard to keep back. All right!" it continued, as a man stepped out. "Go on to the next. We are a bit early on the field; but it is as well to be beforehand, and square things."
As the boat paddled on, another English voice in the stern said in a low tone, "Why did you put Brown there? Just where his father was killed, don't you remember?"
"Just why I did! He won't stand any nonsense, and it is a troublesome job. Besides, he wasn't killed, and there's luck in it. That was a queer story. Some one saved him, of course, but why? and how? Now, Smith! there you are. And, as I said to Brown, for Heaven's sake look after the old dodderers, male and female. When they've nothing left to live for ..."
The rest was lost as the boat went on to a yet farther station.
So, as the sun rose, it rose on that great angled sweep, not of steps, but of humanity; full, pressed down, running over into the spired town behind--on a million and more of dark faces, and a dozen white ones dotted here and there at the most dangerous points.
And Broon-sahib, bearded, a bit burly with his forty and odd years, sat on the plinth, and thought, no doubt, of that past at first, then took out his pipe, and with it some scraps of smoked glass, since the coming eclipse must not be lost, even though one was on duty.
The sun climbed up, brilliantly unconscious, or at least regardless, of its coming fate. And after a time boats began to slide up and down, and a big barge came punting up stream sedately. It was full of English women and children; and under its wide awning a table was laid with flowers and sparkling silver against the champagne breakfast which was to follow on a successful performance of duty.
For not even here could there be allowed hint or sign of that expectancy of possible evil. A little girl holding her mother's hand nodded her yellow curls delightedly, as the barge went past, to Dada sitting swinging his legs just where the blood had dripped into the stream forty years ago; but something in the woman's face made a call echo over the water.
"It's all right. Show going A 1!"
As a show there could be no doubt of that. There was a breathlessness in it, a mighty surge of emotion from one end of that bank of humanity to the other, a curious wail in the ceaseless roar of voices, that struck through eyes and ears to the heart.
And now, what was that?
Broad daylight still; not a shadow had shifted, and yet a sense as if a candle had gone out somewhere.
Broon-sahib put his pipe in his pocket, looked through a glass darkly, stood up, raised his helmet, wiped his forehead, and put it on again.
The time had come--there was a nibble of shadow on the ball of light!--the monster had begun his meal!
As he looked round, unarmed, defenceless, on the hundreds of thousands of dark heads which held this thought, he smiled and nodded with the words.
"Have patience, brethren; there is time!" Doubtless, but not much time to think of other things beyond the mere keeping of that forward crush of bathers, that backward crush of those that had bathed, from inextricable confusion.
So much the better, perhaps. Less time, at any rate, for expectation of the new King who was to fall from the sun and sweep away existing kingdoms. Less time to notice the white horse led out ostentatiously by the Brahmins at the biggest temple, sign that such talk was true, that one æon had passed away, and another--in which Vishnu should appear in his final incarnation--had begun.
"Have patience! Have patience!"
That was the burden of the cry from the few white faces dotted among the dark ones, and it was caught up and echoed by the connecting links of yellow-legged policemen stationed every ten yards along the lowest step.
"Have patience! Have patience!"
A hard saying indeed.
Broon-sahib slipped down from the plinth and collared an old pantaloon just as he fell, hefted him up like a baby, and set him squatting in safety above. Then an old woman, gasping, gurgling from the first mouthful of the water into which, regardless of depth, she had literally been propelled.
"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!"
A harder saying, now that all things had grown grey; though still--weird, uncanny, beyond belief--not a shadow had shifted.
Hopelessly grey, and hopelessly cold--so cold. So curiously quiet, too; for the great roar of voices seemed to have severed itself from things earthly, and was like a mighty wind from heaven.
"Have patience, brethren! Have patience! There is time!"
A harder saying still, when in the greyness, the coldness, a flock of scared pigeons overhead sent a weird flight of faint grey shadows down that long length of angled curve, packed by expectant humanity.
Was He coming indeed?--that new ruler? Were these the heralds?
There was quite a little row, now, of rescued old dodderers on Mai Kâli's plinth, whence the blood had dropped forty years ago.
What was that? Had some one withdrawn a veil? Had some one said, "Let there be light"?
The greyness, the coldness, lost their character in an instant. There was promise in them now--promise of light to come! The sun was reasserting its sway, and--not half of humanity had bathed!
"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!" shouted Broon-sahib, and there was a certain fierce determination in his tone.
Hardest saying of all, when the precious moments were going--going so fast!
"Huzoor!" came a piteous, confused voice behind him from the plinth, "it is my last chance. I am old--I forget. I have forgotten so much--only this remains. For pity's sake--for the sake of forty years ago--let old Bishen, the flower-seller, find salvation!"
Even in his hurry, in his breathless recognition that here was the crucial instant--that a single mistake might bring disaster--Broon-sahib flung a quick look behind him.
He saw a pathetic old face, humble even in its grief.
"It's all right, Baba; there's plenty of time!" he said swiftly. "Here! look through this bit of glass--you'll see for yourself."
It only took a moment, those quick words; he was back, ready with hand and voice of command, almost without a break; but they did more for peace and order than a regiment of soldiers. For old Bishen, after one look through the smoked glass, rose to his feet and salaamed again and again, set, as he was, on high, in sight of all.
"Yea! it is true," he cried, in his thin old voice. "There is time. Let us wait, brethren; for they know--the gods have told them."
Half-an-hour afterwards, with its table laid with flowers and silver, the sliding barge held Englishmen as well as Englishwomen; and one of them was drinking deep draughts of iced beer, while a little girl with yellow hair watched him admiringly, and a woman, still rather pale of face, stood looking at him with evident relief.
"I told you it would be all right, my dear," he said, smiling. "There never was any rush to speak of but once; and then I gave a bit of smoked glass to an old chap, and he saw through a glass darkly what was up, and told the others. So we squared 'em--gods and Brahmins and all-as I told you we should, in spite of all the talk and the telegrams."
[THE KEEPER OF THE PASS]
The low hills, as they lay baking in the sunshine of noon, showed in scallops of glare against the light-bleached sky. A fine dust, reddish but for that same bleaching of light, hid every green thing far and near, making them match the straggling camel-thorns, the stunted wormwood, the tufts of chamomile, and many another nameless aromatic herb which in these low hills come into the world ready dressed in dust, as it were, against the long rainless months.
Yet it was not hot here in the uplands, and so the district officer's tent was opened at one side and propped up by bamboos more for the convenience of its occupant holding an open-air audience than from any quest after coolness. The upward tilt gave the tent a quaintly lopsided look, as if it were some gigantic bird flapping one wing in its attempt to rise and fly away from the little hollow in which it stood.
It was a motley crowd, indeed, which awaited the fiat of the Dispenser of Justice in these fastnesses of the central hills of India; those climbing, rolling upward sweeps of sandstone where the ripple mark of the tides that built them remains to tell of the vanished sea which had once covered this dry and thirsty land, where no water is for nine long months of the year.
It was a curious crowd also. It could not fail of being that, since it struck the two extremes of that vast Indian scale of so-called culture, so-called civilisation. For a land case involving several miles of country was in dispute, and the semi-Europeanised, wholly clothed lawyers engaged on it stood cheek by jowl with the semi-clothed wholly aboriginal witnesses in it; representatives for the most part of the wild tribes belonging to these waste lands and forests. Rude iron-smelters, almost touching the bronze age in absolute savagery; or wandering fowlers, barbaric even to the extent of eating their poor, old, undesirable relations!
In one group, however, consisting of an old man and a young one, a quick observer might have noticed a palpable discrepancy between the dress (or the lack of it) and the address of the wearers. A discrepancy which made the magistrate of the district look up with a smile.
"Hullo! Nâgdeo!" he said. "On the warpath after a tiger?" The old man salaamed down to the ground. His skin was very dark, so that his white moustache and thin white whiskers, brushed out to stand, each hair singly, in a forward curve, like the whiskers of a cat, seemed to glisten against it. For the rest, he was small, slight, but extremely muscular, and he carried himself with no little dignity and importance.
"Not so, Huzoor," he replied, and his speech rose higher in that scale of culture and civilisation than his dress, which was no more than a waistcloth, a string of tiger claws, and a tasselled spear--"I come to put another foot on it. This is my grandson, Huzoor."
The dignity, the importance grew fifty-fold as he turned to the lad by his side. A good head taller, fairer of skin, infinitely better looking, there was yet something about the figure which made the eye turn back to the smaller, older one, as it stood before authority with a certain authority of its own.
He was, as all knew, explained Nâgdeo, the keeper of one of the wildest passes in that wild country, as his father and his father's father had been. Who could deny it? Was not their very caste name, to distinguish them from others, Ghâtwâl, or pass-keeping ones?
He had had to keep his a long time, because the Old God had decreed that his son should be defeated by a tigress and her cubs; which might happen to the best of pass-keeping ones, since those things feminine were untrustworthy. Consequently he (Nâgdeo) had had to go on beyond the years of greatest activity until his grandson reached them.
But here the boy was now. Of age, twenty; than most, taller; as any, learned in jungle law; with the spear, nimble; to keep the pass, ready; to be enrolled, present, the Old God before--
With his subject the old man's words had returned to the idiom of a wilder tongue, and he drew out of his waistcloth a little iron image of a tiger, not three inches long, to which he salaamed reverently.
For this was the Old God.
"What is your grandson's name?" asked the district officer.
It was Baghéla (tiger cub), said Nâgdeo.
It had seemed a suitable name for one born six months after his father had been found lying dead on the top of a dead tigress, his dead lips close to the teats that would suckle her dead whelps no more.
That had been a misfortune, deplorable yet without shame, and due, possibly, to the dead youth's over-soon marriage to a thing feminine; such things being notoriously untrustworthy! Therefore he had refrained from entangling this one with such things feminine, the more so because there were already sufficient of them in the house, what with Baghéla's mother and grandmother. Briefly, the worship of two female things was sufficient for any lad without adding to the adulation by a third!
So, in the evening, when the magistrate's legal work was over, the old man and the young one came up to the tilted tent again, and, after a curious little oath of fealty to the Old God--in the shape of the three-inch tiger--and a vow of war till death against live things that mimicked his shape had been taken from his grandfather's dictation by Baghéla, the latter's name was duly enrolled as hereditary guardian of the Jâdusa Pass, and the two struck a bee-line towards home over the low jungle as if it belonged to them.
As indeed it did; since few travellers, save the keepers of the passes, ventured to brave the tigers dreaming in their lairs, or pacing the trackless wastes hungrily, after dark.
But old Nâgdeo was jubilant over the mere chance of coming across one; not that it was likely, since what tiger ever was whelped which would dare to face him and his grandson? "Men"--here he gave a sidelong glance of pure adoration at Baghéla's height--"who had no backs; who, if they failed, as even pass-keepers must sometimes, were found face up to the sky, face up to the claws, face up to the teeth!"
Of course, sometimes, the accursed brutes who assumed the shape of the Blessed Budhal Pen--the Old God of Gods--would, out of sheer spite, roll a dead man over and claw at his back; but that also was without shame, since dead men had no choice.
So the old man babbled on garrulously, and the young one listened, till they reached the little village at the foot of the pass. The moon had risen by this time, and showed the upright slabs of sandstone clustering under the wide-spreading tamarind trees on its outskirts. Slabs marking the graves of dead and gone inhabitants.
"I am ready now for the young girls to break their pitchers and cover my emptiness with the shards," said the old man, pausing for a second beside a cluster of these stones. Then he raised his hand and spoke to the unseen: "Fear not, Slumberers! He who comes to join you hath no scratch upon his back."
That was his Nunc Dimittis. After which he made his way to a low shingled stone hut, covered with gourds, which stood on some rising ground outside the hamlet towards the pass; drank to excess--from pure joy--of a nauseous spirit made by the untrustworthy feminine out of wild berries, and then slept as sound as if he were indeed with the Slumberers.
For this question of the due keeping of the pass had been on the old man's nerves for months. The rains would be due ere long, bringing, no doubt, those twinges of lumbago to a grandfather's back which had of late made it difficult, indeed, to keep the pass open for travellers; since to do that a man must give the beasts no rest. He must harry their lairs when they were absent, scare them from the road with strange noises and ringing of bells, and, if they were obdurate, face claws and teeth.
But now there was some one to do all this. Some one of the true race, yet by the fiat of the Old God bigger than most. Ay! and with more personal enmity than most towards the evil ones who stole the Old God's likeness. For must not those six unborn mouths of wrong, of loss, of grief and anger, count for something?
Yes! Baghéla would be a Keeper of the Pass, indeed! That was the old man's thought as he fell asleep, his dream as he lay sound as the Slumberers themselves. And Baghéla slept, too, the badge of his new office, a necklace of tiger claws, round his neck, a tasselled spear, hung with jingling bells, beside him. But the untrustworthy feminine, the mother, the grandmother, still sate by the embers of the fire whispering fearfully; for they knew that those six unborn mouths, translated in their way, might mean something very different.
Baghéla himself, however, had no suspicion of the possibility. He set about his new duties with an immense amount of swagger. The least hint of a marauding intruder about the winding path which led to the fertile valleys towards the south, would send him through the village with boastful jinglings of his bells. And, as luck would have it, that jingling seemed all powerful for a time towards the keeping of the pass.
Nâgdeo, who, now that the necessity for presenting a youthful appearance was over, permitted himself a seat amongst the village elders, a certain stiffness of carriage generally, used to boast of this peace dogmatically. Such a thing as no news, even, of intruders, so far on in the season, was unheard of. He himself, in his palmiest days, had never been so fear-compelling. It was those six unborn mouths of hereditary hatred which did it, no doubt.
And Baghéla thought so too, as long as the rain was slight, as long as the flocks and herds kept to the uplands, and only the shepherds and herdsmen had tales to tell of loss. Then, one day, the clouds broke in slanting shafts of almost solid rain, and the water ran over the rippled sandhills as if it had been a tide once more. Then the sun shone for another day, and at dusk everything but a yard or two of shadow round Baghéla as he patrolled the path was a blank nothingness, blotting out even the darkness with wet, impenetrable vapour, dulling even the sound of the bells, deadening all scent.
So, neither he nor the tiger had an instant's warning.
They were face to face in a moment.
Then Baghéla knew what those unborn mouths had wrought in him. Terror, absolute, uncontrollable, seized on all his young strength; he knew nothing save the desire to escape. The next instant he felt a hot vapour on his back, heard the husky angry cough that sent it there, and all that young strength of his spent itself in a cry like that of the untrustworthy thing feminine, when they had told it of a young husband's death.
Into the mist he fled, feeling the cold vapour in his face, the hot behind; until, suddenly desperate, every atom of him leaped forward from what lay behind, and he fell.
None too soon; for even as he shot downward a shadow shot over him in the mist, and something ripped his bare back lightly, as, with greater impetus than his, that shadow plunged into the void.
A second afterwards a long-drawn howl of rage and spite rose upward through the mist to meet Baghéla's whimpers as he lay, caught above the sheer precipice, by a bush.
After a while he rose and crept carefully up to the verge; then sate and shivered at himself; at this inheritance of fear. And more than once his hand sought that faint scratch upon his back. It was not much; not more than a kitten might have made in play, but he felt it like a brand.
By degrees, however, he began to think. The tiger must be lying dead, or at least helpless, below the rocks. He must get down to it, leave the marks of his spear in it; the mark of its claws ...
A surge of shame swept through him. No! he must go back unscathed; no one must have the chance, in dressing wounds, of seeing that faint mark behind.
So the next morning, old Nâgdeo could scarcely contain himself for pride, as he sate among the village elders. The boy had killed his first tiger without a scratch. Had brought home its skin, the biggest seen for years. True, the lad himself had found the fight too hard, and was even now shivering and shaking with ague; but that only proved how hard the fight had been. And the untrustworthy feminine were dosing him, so he would be afoot again in a day or two. Then the village would see that, ere a month was over, a naked child might go through the pass alone in safety. But it was not so!
Baghéla, it is true, was well enough by day, but as the dusk came on, his strong young limbs always fell a shivering and a shaking. "There is more room for quaking, see you, in him than in me," old Nâgdeo would explain elaborately to his cronies, as he held out an arm, which with the inaction, the sudden cessation of imperious efforts, began to show its age clearly; "but one must pay for size and strength, and courage; and there is no harm done as yet. The mimicking devils had their lesson when he killed their champion without a scratch."
But the harm came in time. A party of salt-carriers, taking advantage of a break in the rains, arrived at the village carrying an extra load; the body of a man killed by a tiger, half eaten by jackals.
"Ague or no ague, sonling," said old Nâgdeo almost coaxingly to the lad half-an-hour after the appearance of this grim visitor, "thy bells must be heard in the pass to-night. They will be all-sufficient, considering the lesson thou hast taught the beasts. And thou art strong enough for the ringing of bells. Thou canst return afterwards to shiver and shake, sonling, since thou art not of those to do that in the pass. No! no!"
The old man's chuckle at his little joke was tenderly triumphant; but, when he had gone, and the untrustworthy feminine alone remained, Baghéla turned with a sob to his mother, who crouched beside him, and hid his face in her clothes, as if he had been a hurt child.
"Mother!" he cried, "I got it from thee!"
"Yes! heart of my heart," she answered passionately, "and from thy murdered father too. Have I not told thee so, often? As for this old man! See you! Since this has come upon us, and the shivering is no longer refuge--go! There is no need to ring the bells--no need to go farther than the little caves. And the old man fails fast. He will not live long. Then, when he is dead, the old tale will be told, and we can tell a new one, like other folk. Why, even now, see you, there is no need for travellers to cross the pass. Let them take the 'rail' which the Huzoors have made! All this old-world talk is foolishness--yesterday's bread has been eaten, its water drunk; 'tis time for a new dinner!"
It was more than a month after this that some one, sitting on the village daïs underneath the tamarind trees in sight of the Slumberers, in trying to use a betel-cutter, said carelessly, "It hath grown rusty, like Baghéla's bells!"
Nâgdeo turned on the speaker like lightning. That month had left him curiously aged, with a wistful, anxious expectancy on his old face. Though when, more than once, folk had commented on his changed looks, and asked what ailed him, he had only replied, almost apologetically, "Death lingers; 'tis time I was with the Slumberers, since Baghéla keeps the pass as his fathers did."
But now his old voice rose haughtily, "Like thy wits rather! Canst not see that the youth hath been overbrave? The mimicking devils will not face the bells. And who can kill a foe that keeps his distance? And if the bells ring not, is it not in hopes to lure the cowards close--to take them unawares?"
The arguments came swiftly, as if they had been rehearsed before; rehearsed without audience; and yet when old Nâgdeo moved off as if in displeasure, his hands crept out towards the stones which marked the Slumberers, his eyes sought them almost pitifully.
And that night, after Baghéla had gone on his rounds, after the untrustworthy feminine had slothfully sought its bed, the old Keeper of the Pass crept out in the rear of the young one, spear in hand; yet without the jingles, since what need was there for two sets?
Two! But where was the one?
The old man's face grew more feline in its watchful anxiety, as he prowled among the bushes in the half moonlit darkness, listening for the challenge. And none came, though more than once in the denser shadow of thick jungle, he saw two spots of green light telling that some one was waiting to be challenged. But where was the challenger?
The night was far spent ere he was found, fast asleep on a bed of dry leaves in the little cave.
The sight seemed to take the finder back, not to his more immediate ancestors, the purely savage hunters of those low hills, but to something older still, to the barbarians who had swept down on them to found principalities and powers; for all the calm dignity of the Indo-Scythic sculptures was in Nâgdeo's pose as he pricked the sleeper with his spear.
"Rise up, Keeper of the Pass; they wait for thee without."
Baghéla was on his feet in a second. He knew the time had come, and something of the old racial courage in him held that new fear in check.
Until, not a hundred yards without the cave, in the faint grey light of the now coming dawn, a paler shadow showed in the darker shadows, long, low, sinuous; and something moved across their path with no sound of footfall; only a crackle of dry twigs, a sudden, soft, short wheeze, and then silence.
"Ring the bells, Keeper of the Pass," came the old man's voice. "There is no fear. Has not the tale of thy prowess spread among the tiger people?"
His prowess! The sting of that slight scratch was as fire on the lad's back; he paused. But a spear from behind reached to his, struck it sideways, and the next instant the challenge echoed through the pass.
And was accepted.
The shadow grew short, showed paler; till two green lights flashed out, and with a roar that rolled among the rocks, the tiger faced them, crouched and sprang.
Old Nâgdeo, his vanished youth returning for a space, sprang too, watching that other spring; so, spear in hand, found himself close to the striped skin of the base usurper of the Old God's shape, into which, with all the force he possessed, he drove his weapon's point. But Baghéla, with no thought but flight, felt the full force of those mighty claws on his back, and fell. Perhaps his neck was broken; anyhow, he lay still, heedless of the piteous cry that followed:--
"Face him, Keeper of the Pass! Face the teeth, face the claws, ere thou seekest the Slumberers!"
Yet the entreaty was not utterly disregarded; since--Baghéla dead--that Keepership passed again to one whose face faced the old enemy bravely.
That face, however, had no triumph of victory in it, when Nâgdeo stooped over his grandson's body, and turned its scored back to be hidden by Mother Earth. There was no mark anywhere else--not a scratch. That, at any rate, must not be. That must be remedied before the villagers saw it; before even the sun saw it. For was not Budhal Pen, the Old God, the Sun-god also?
So he drew the lad's body deliberately within reach of the mighty claws, and used them, slack as they were in newly-come death, for his purpose.
Then he sat down beside the two dead bodies, and looked at his own for scratch or hurt. There was not one; not even a bruise, not a spot of blood. So none need know. The girls might weep as they broke their pitchers over Baghéla bewailing his dead courage.
The courage which had died before he did, though none should know of it. Yet it had died. And who was to blame?
Nâgdeo sat gazing stupidly at his grandson's long length, at his fairer beauty; then suddenly he stood up.
That was it, of course!
And if that were so, then it were best to settle it before dawn, when folk might come prying. He bent curiously over the dead lad, then laid his hand on the dead heart.
"Go! Keeper of the Pass, to the Slumberers without fear. I, Nâgdeo, will punish the intruder."
Half-an-hour after, he stood silently in his hut beside his still sleeping wife. The old woman, blind, deaf, near her end as it was, scarcely stirred as he drove his spear through her heart.
"I doubt thee not, Naolé," he said inwardly, "unless a devil wronged thee; but thy son's son must be avenged. He must take no stranger's blood to the Slumberers."
But Herdâsi, the lad's mother, was awake, and screamed.
"Hold thy peace, fool!" said the old man, fiercely, "if thou wouldst not proclaim thyself harlot. Thy son is dead--face downwards. It came not from me, nor from my son; so that of us which goes to join the Slumberers must be avenged on the vile spirit that took form within thee. Come out from under the bed, woman! if thou wouldst prove he got it not with thy knowledge. Oh! untrustworthy feminine!"
And after a pause the untrustworthy feminine did come out with a curious dignity.
"He got it not from me but from my love. Yet what matter if he be dead!" said Herdâsi, and so died with her face to the foe to save her son's name. Since, if it was a devil's doing, none could blame the lad.
They found the old man sitting beside the two dead women when they came to tell him that the Keeper of the Pass had given his life for its safety.
"Yea, I know," replied Nâgdeo, quietly. "I went and found him before dawn when he returned not. So I came home and slew these useless ones. Since he was dead, and I am nigh death, and there was none to keep the untrustworthy feminine from wandering."
He adhered to this story steadfastly in the district magistrate's court, and when he was condemned to death made but one request--that he might be allowed to face it with the insignia of his office about him. So on the eve of his execution they gave the old man back his necklace of tiger claws, and told him he would be allowed to jingle his bells on his way to the scaffold. But when they came to rouse him in the morning he was lying dead, face upward; his arms, his chest, his throat all rent and ripped by those same tiger claws.
But there was not even a scratch upon the back of the last Keeper of the Pass.
[THE PERFUME OF THE ROSE]
"I think we ought to be going back to the others," said the girl.
She was a pretty, fair English girl, fresh as a rose in her dainty pink muslin dress, flounced as they wore them in the mutiny year--in three full flounces to the waist, like the corolla of a flower. And the lace sunshade she held tilted over her shoulder as a protection against the slanting rays of the afternoon sun added to her rose-likeness by its calyx of pale green lining.
"Ought we?" said the young Englishman who walked beside her, his hand clasping hers. They were a good-looking pair, pleasant to behold. "What a bore; it is so jolly here."
The epithet was not happy, save as an expression of the speaker's frame of mind. For the garden into which these engaged lovers had wandered away from the gay party of English men and women who had taken possession of the marble summer-house in its centre for a picnic, or, as the natives call it, "a fool's dinner," was something more than jolly.
It was beautiful, this garden of a dead dynasty of kings past and gone like last year's roses.
But there were roses and to spare still within its high four-square walls that were hidden from each other by the burnished orange-groves, by the tall forest trees fringing its cross of wide marble aqueducts bordered by wide paths.
Such blossoming trees! The kachnar flinging its bare branches, set thick with its geranium flowers, against the creamy feathers waving among the dense dark foliage of the mangoes, the bakayun drooping its long lilac tassels beside the great gold ones of the umultâs, and here and there its whole vitality lavished on a monstrous leaf or two, a huge flower or two, white, curved, solid, as if cut in cold marble, yet with a warm fragrance at its heart, a hill magnolia challenged the scent of the roses below.
Ineffectually, at least here in this square of the garden; for that cross of wide, empty aqueducts divided it into squares.
And this one was a square of roses--roses everywhere, even in the lower level of what in the old kingly days had been a marble-edged water-way, which now, half filled with soil, held more roses.
But they were all of one kind--the pink Persian rose, whose outer petals pale in the sunlight, whose rose of roses heart is full of an almost piercing perfume.
What wonder, when it is the otto of roses rose! It grew here for that set purpose in orderly lines, its grey green, velvety leaves almost hidden by its profusion of flowers.
And the scent of them filled the whole square of garden, where the air, still warm from the past noon, lay prisoned in that fringe of blossoming trees.
It seemed to fill the brain, also, with the quintessence of gladness, beauty, life, and love.
So His arm sought Her waist and their eyes met.
But only for a second; the next, Her blush matching Her flounces, She had drawn back, and He with an angry frown was glaring in the direction of the voice which had interrupted them.
It was a high, clear voice full of little trills and bubblings like a bird's, and it sang on incessantly, as if to give those two time to recover from their confusion. And as it sang, the Persian vowels seemed as piercingly sweet as the perfume into which they echoed.
"The rose-root takes earth's kisses for its meat,
The rose-leaf makes its blush from the sun's heat,
The rose-scent wakes-who knows from what thing sweet?
Who knows
The secret of the perfume of the rose?"
As the song ended, a head showed above the tufted bushes. It was rather a fine head; bare of covering, its long grizzled hair parted in the middle lying in a smooth outward curve on the high narrow forehead, then sweeping in an equal inside curve between the ear and throat. So much, no more, was to be seen above the roses, save, for a moment, a long-fingered, delicate brown hand hiding the face in its salaam.
"Who the shaitan are you?" asked the young man fiercely in Hindustani.
The head and hand met in a second salaam, then the face showed; rather a fine face, preternaturally grave, but with a cunning comprehension in its gravity.
"I am Hushmut the essence-maker, Huzoor," was the reply. "I belong to the garden, and, being hidden from the noble people in my occupation of plucking roses for my still, I sang to let them know."
The young Englishman gave a half-embarrassed laugh.
"What does he say?" asked the girl. She had only been two months in India, and these had been spent in falling in love.
"He thought we might like to know he was there, that's all--a joke, isn't it?" answered her lover. She smiled, and so holding each other's hands boldly they stood facing that head above the roses.
It nodded cheerfully.
"The Huzoors are doubtless about-to-marry persons," came the voice. "It is not always so, even with the Huzoors. But this being different, if they require essences for the bridal let them come to Hushmut. Rose, jasmine, orange, sandal, lemon grass. I make them all in their season. Yea, even 'wylet'[[4]] which the memi love. It is not really banafsha, Huzoor; they grow not in the plains. I make it from the babul blossom, and none could tell the difference. Mayhap there is none, since He who makes the perfume of the flowers in His still, may send the same to many blossoms, as I send my essences to many lovers; even the noble people!"
There was distinct raillery in the last words, and the young Englishman's smile vanished.
"We people hold not with essences," he said curtly; adding to the girl, "Come, dear, I think we really ought to go back, your father will be wanting to go home--he has a lot of work, I know--"
A shuffle in the bushes made the lovers pause, a curious shuffle such as a wounded bird makes in its efforts to escape.
"If the most noble will tarry, this slave will at least make the luck-offering to the bride," came the voice again, and to point its meaning the delicate brown hand held up a circular shallow basket heaped with rose-petals. Heaped so lightly, that the hand held it level, and it seemed to glide on the top of the bushes, heralding the grizzled head which slid after it with a faintly undulating movement.
The cause of this became clear when the limit of the roses was reached.
Hushmut the essence-maker must have been a cripple from birth. The loose blue cloth, such as gardeners wear knotted round their loins like a petticoat, hid, however, all deformity, even when he clambered up the marble edge of the old water-way, and shuffled with sidelong jerks along the path to the pink muslin flounces.
The wearer's eyes grew soft suddenly. The mystery of such births came home to the woman who was so soon to be a wife, perhaps a mother.
She gave him a mother's look anyhow; the look of almost passionate pity a woman gives to a child's deformity.
Perhaps he saw it. Anyhow he paused; then, with his bold black eyes twinkling, held out the basket.
"A handful, Huzoor, for luck!" he cried.
"A rose ungathered is but a rose,
Pluck it, lover, don't mind a thorn;
Tuck it away in your bosom-clothes,
And drink its beauty from night to morn."
The voice trilled and bubbled quite decorously, but the young Englishman intercepted a deliberate wink, and felt inclined to kick Hushmut to lower levels; till he remembered that the girl could not understand.
"Take a handful," he said, "and let's get rid of him." The girl obeyed, but, by mere chance, the little white hand with his ring on it did tuck its handful of pink rose-leaves away in the loose pink ruffles on her breast. Whereat Hushmut's approval became so unmistakable that the young Englishman felt that the only thing was to escape from it.
Yet as he hurried the girl back to the summerhouse he turned to listen to the essence-maker's voice as he went on with his song, and his rose-picking.
"Dig, gardener! deep; till the Earth-lips cling tight.
Prune, gardener! keep those blushes to the light.
Then, gardener, sleep! he brings the scent by night.
Who knows
The secret of the perfume of the rose?"
There was nothing to be seen now but the stunted grey green bushes half hidden in blossom; even the head had disappeared. They were a queer people, thought the young man, very difficult to understand. Then the refrain returned to him--
"Who knows
The secret of the perfume of the rose?"
"Hushmut?" answered an older man who lounged smoking in one of the marble-fretted balconies of the dead King's pleasure-house. "Oh, yes! he is quite a character. A scoundrel, I believe; at least he knows all the worst lots in the city. They come to the garden at night, you see, and the bazaar women get all their essences from him. So I expect he knows at any rate of all the devilry that's going on. I wish I did." The speaker's face looked a trifle harassed.
"Is it true, sir, what they say?" asked another voice, "that Hushmut is really the King's son. That his mother was a Brahmin girl they kidnapped, who cried herself to death in one of these rooms. Then, when the child was a cripple, the King--by Jove, he was a brute!--disowned it."
"Is that about Hushmut?" asked the girl, who had joined the group in time to hear the last words.
The men looked at each other, and the older one said: "Yes, my dear; they say he was deserted by his parents because he was a cripple. Rather rough on him. Now I think I'll go and get your mother to come home. It's getting late. You'll follow, I suppose?"
"Yes, father, with him," she said, with a rose-blush.
So, by degrees, in couples, as a rule, but sometimes with a pale-faced child tucked into the carriage between father and mother, the pleasure-seekers left the garden of dead Kings to the scent of the roses. Left it cheerfully, calling back to their friends times and places where they were to meet again, as English men and women did on those fatal evenings in May, '57.
Only the girl in the pink frock and her lover lingered; while the dogcart in which he was to drive her home waited under the blossoming trees.
And as they stood talking, as lovers will, Hushmut the essence-maker, thinking the coast was clear, came shuffling down the scented shadow of the path--for the sun had left the garden--pushing his basket of rose-leaves before him, dragging his crippledom behind him.
"Do you think he would show us his still?" said the girl, suddenly. "I've never seen one. Ask him, will you?"
Hushmut's big, bold black eyes twinkled. Certainly the Miss-sahiba might see. There was no secret in his work. He took the scent as he found it, as wise men took love. Again there was that faint suspicion of raillery only to be pardoned by the girl's ignorance, and also by a conviction that Hushmut counted on that ignorance, and meant the remark only for the young Englishman. And so, oddly, the latter became conscious of a distinct antagonism between himself and the crippled essence-maker. It was absurd, ludicrous; but it existed, nevertheless.
There was not much to see in those vaults under the plinth of the pleasure-palace in which Hushmut had set up his distillery. They were very low, very dark, the only light coming through the open door, and from the row of rose-shaped air-holes pierced at intervals in the plinth. Viewed from outside, these formed part of its raised and pierced marble decoration. From within they looked quaint and flower-like, set as they were in the dim shadowy vault, hidden here and there by the dumpy columns, showing through the arches distantly, softly, brightly pink; for Hushmut had pasted pink paper over them, to keep out the bees and wasps, he explained, which otherwise, led by the scent of the flowers, came in troublesome numbers.
The rude still, like a huge cooking-pot, stood in one corner, and all about it lay trays on trays of fading rose-leaves.
"Pah! How sickly sweet! Let's get outside," said the young man after a brief glance round. But the girl stood looking curiously at a brownish-yellow mass piled beside the still.
"What is that?" she asked. Hushmut's black eyes turned to her comprehendingly. He shuffled to the pile and held out a sample for her to see. She bent to look at it.
"Rose-leaves!" she said. "Oh! I see--after scent has been taken out of them. Poor things! What a shame!"
Hushmut said something rapidly in Hindustani, and the girl turned to her companion for explanation.
"He says," translated the latter, with a curiously grudging note in his voice, "that they have their use. He dries them in the sun and burns them in the furnace of his still."
She shook her head and smiled. "That's poor compensation!" Then she bent closer and sniffed regretfully at what Hushmut held.
"All gone!" she said, so like a child that her lover laughed at her tenderly.
"What else did you expect, you goose!
'Only the actions of the just, smell sweet and blossom in the dust!'
So come; we really must be off; it's getting late."
He felt in his pocket, and held out a baksheesh to Hushmut; but the latter shook his head, and once more said something rapidly in Hindustani. It had a note of petition in it, but the request was apparently not to the hearer's taste. That was to be seen from his face.
"What does he want?" asked the girl, curiously.
"Nothing he is going to get," replied her lover, moving off; "the cheek of the man!"
But the pink muslin stood its ground. "What is it?" she persisted; "I want to know. He doesn't look to me as if he meant to be rude, and--and"--her face softened--"if it is anything we can do, I'd--I'd like to do it. Tell me, please."
The young fellow shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
"Oh! only fooling! He wants you to give him back some of the rose-leaves he gave you, that he may put them in his new brew, to--to make it sweeter; says the luck-gift of a bride always does--"
The girl blushed and smiled all over.
"Well, why not? It is a pretty idea, anyhow." She drew out the handful of rose-leaves as she spoke, then paused with a faint wonder, for the warmth of their shelter had made their perfume almost bewildering.
"How--how sweet they are!" she murmured. Then, still smiling, but with the blush faded almost to paleness, she dropped the rose-leaves into the delicate, long-fingered hand.
"I hope it will be the sweetest essence you ever made," she said with a laugh, and Hushmut seemed to understand, for he smiled back and salaamed as he, in his turn, tucked the charm into his bosom for use when the still should be ready for closing, and as he did so, he said in his high, suave voice--
"May He who knows the secret of the rose protect the bride." He said it without the least suspicion of reality; simply as a dignified piece of courtesy.
A minute afterwards the wheels of that last dogcart, as it drove out of the garden, disturbed the birds which had already begun to choose their resting-places for the night; since they too looked for the usual rest and peace in that fatal Maytime.
And for a space the peace, the rest settled on the garden. Only Hushmut's voice, as he busied himself in packing the pink petals into his still, told of any life in it beyond the birds, the flowers, the bees.
One of these, belated, drifted into the vault through the open door, and hummed a background to the high, trilling voice.
"Pale, pale are the rose-lips, sweet!
Red is the heart of the rose,
But red are the lips mine meet,
And your heart white as the snows."
Then a faint, almost noiseless patter of bare running feet paused at the door, and some one looked in to say breathlessly--
"It hath begun, they say. But who knows? I am off to the city to see."
Hushmut looked up startled from his rose-leaves; startled, nothing more.
"Begun!--so soon--wherefore?"
"God knows!" came the breathless voice. "Mayhap it is a lie. Some thought it would not come at all. I will return and tell thee the news."
The faint, almost noiseless patter of bare feet died away, and there was peace and rest in the garden for another space. Only Hushmut shuffled to the door, looked out curiously, then shuffled back to his work, for that must be finished before dark, else the roses would spoil, squandering their sweetness. There was another pile of brownish, yellow residuum ready dried for the furnace, and as he filled a basket with it, his hands among the scentless stuff, a sudden remembrance of his own impotence, his own deprivation, came to him. Perhaps he had seen a hint of the simile in the English girl's face.
He smiled half cynically and muttered--
"Only the dust of the rose remains for the perfume-seller."
He paused almost before the bit of treasured wisdom was ended. There was a sound of wheels; of a galloping horse's feet.
Some one was coming back to the garden. The next instant, through the open door, he saw two figures running; an Englishman, an English girl in a pink dress. The man's arm was round her as he ran; he looked back fearfully, then seemed to whisper something in her ear, and she gave answer back.
"What was it?" they said to each other. Hushmut knew by instinct.
He was thinking of the roof of the palace pleasure-house, of the winding stair that led to it, down which it would at least be possible to fling a foe, before the end came; and She was thinking of the marble plinth below, where, when that end came, a woman might find safety from men's hands in death.
So they came on through the growing shadows.
Hushmut shuffled to the door and watched the figures calmly, indifferently, as they neared him; for the way to the winding stair lay up the steps which rose just beyond the low door of his distillery in the plinth.
Perhaps the dusk hid him from those two; perhaps even in broad daylight they would not, in their fierce desire to reach not safety but resistance, have seen him.
They did not, anyhow; but as they passed the door the girl's muslin flounce caught hard on its lintel hasp, and as in frantic haste she stooped to rip it free, the scent of those rose-leaves Hushmut had given her, still lingering in the ruffles at her breast, seemed to pass straight back into those same rose-leaves in his own.
That was all, nothing more. But it brought back his last words to her: "May He who knows the secret of the rose protect the bride."
Strange!
The same instant his long-fingered brown hand was on her white one as she tugged at her dress.
"This way, Huzoor!" he cried in a loud voice, for the man to hear. "There is a secret passage here; it leads to safety."
Safety! That word, better than resistance, not to the man himself, but as sole guardian to the girl, arrested him in a second, tempted him.
He looked, hesitated, then dragged his charge on--dragged her from anything with a dark skin to it.
But her white one touching this dark one, found something in it to give confidence; or perhaps that fragrance of the flower from His still which "He sends to many blossoms," had passed from Hushmut's breast to hers, as hers had to Hushmut's. He knows, who knows the secret of the perfume of the rose.
Anyhow she hung back, and she called pitifully, clamorously--
"No! No! Let us trust him--let us take the chance."
There was no time for remonstrance.
The next second they were in the cool, scented darkness of the vault, with those pink air-holes showing like shadowy roses among the low arches, the squat pillars.
"At the farther end," came Hushmut's voice, amid his shuffling, till the latter ceased in the rasping of a chain unhasped. "Here, Huzoor, it leads to the Summer Palace beyond the garden wall. So by the mango groves to the Residency. May He who knows the secret of the perfume of the rose protect the bride."
His voice sounded hollow in their ears as they ran down the vaulted passage which opened before them, lit at intervals by those cunning air-holes hidden flowerfully in the scrollwork of one of the marble-edged aqueducts, and the closing door behind them blew a breath of the rose scent from the vault after their retreating figures.
* * * * *
Two years had passed. Nine long months spent in keeping a foe at bay; three in following that spent and broken foe to the bitter end; and then a year of English skies and English faces to dull the memory of that long strain to mind and body.
And then once more a young Englishman, with a girl in a pink dress, drove into that garden of dead Kings. But the four-square wall was in ruins. It had been a rallying-point of that spent and broken foe.
The garden itself was neglected, the roses unpruned. And those two were changed also, and an ayah holding a baby remained in the hired carriage which they left waiting for them under the blossoming trees, as the dogcart had waited that May evening two years before.
"I'm afraid he must have thought us awfully ungrateful," said the man, regretfully. "But it couldn't be helped at first; then afterwards one had to move on. But I did write, you know, more than once about him, after we got a grip on the place again; so I hope they have done something."
"They will have to now, at any rate," said the wearer of the pink dress, firmly.
The sight of the garden, changed, neglected as it was, had brought back the very picture of that grizzled head with the curved hair, slipping through the rose-bushes, the delicate dark hand holding the tray of rose-leaves, as it slid over the bushes with its luck-offering for the bride. Yes! even if justice had been slow, inevitably slow, it should come now. This very evening, though she and her husband had only arrived in the station that morning.
They went to the rose square first, but Hushmut was not there. Then, seeing by the lack of blossom that the time of roses was not yet, they went on to the orange groves.
No one was there. So, doubtfully, they passed to the jasmine, to the lemon grass.
But no one was to be seen. Nothing was to be heard but the lazy yet insistent cry of some one scaring the birds from the pomegranates.
"Let us ask him. He may know," suggested the wearer of the pink dress. So they called him and he came--an old man, wizened, careworn.
Yes, he said, he knew. Wherefore not, when he had guarded fruit in that garden since he was a boy? There was not much to guard now, owing to past evils. Hushmut the essence-maker--Hushmut was dead. No one made essences any more. How did he die? Very simply. He had seen it with his own eyes when he was guarding fruit. The Huzoors had doubtless heard of the evil times, even though, as the coachman had told him, they had just come from wilayet. Well, it began quite suddenly one evening in May. It was the peaches he was guarding then. There had been a "fool's dinner" in the garden, and afterwards a young sahib and a miss in a pink dress had come running in to take refuge from the troopers. He had seen them, but what could he do? But Hushmut had shown them the secret passage, no doubt. Anyhow he had come out alone and closed the door, and sate beside it singing when the troopers rode up.
And doubtless they would have believed him, seeing that he was friends with all the bad walkers in the city through the selling of his essences; but for a bit of the Miss-sahiba's dress which had caught in the door hasp. So they knew what he had done, and being enraged, had killed him there, by the door. It was quite simple.
Quite. So simple that those two said nothing. Only their hands sought each other as they turned back to the summer-house.
"I should like to see the place again," said the wearer of the pink dress in a hard, even voice. "I wonder if the door is open?"
It was; for no one made essences now. So they entered.
The still stood in the corner as before. The pile of that strange fuel lay between it and the trays of rose-leaves. But there was no difference between them now. Both were yellow, scentless; and though the pink paper which Hushmut had pasted over the rose-shaped air-holes was all broken and torn by birds and winds and weather, the bees did not drift in.
For there was no scent to lead them on. None.
The winds of two long years had swept it away absolutely. What else was to be expected?
Yet a vague disappointment showed in the woman's face as it had in the girl's.
But this time the man's voice trembled as he answered her look with the words--
"Only the actions of the just,
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."
[LITTLE HENRY AND HIS BEARER]
CHAPTER I
When I was a child I wept over a story--if I remember right, by Mrs. Sherwood--which bore this title.
Years after I came to man's estate, I felt inclined to weep over an incident in real life which this title seemed to fit.
Looking back on those first tears, I judge them uncalled for by what my maturer age condemns as false sentiment. Perhaps my later emotion is equally at fault. The reader had better judge for himself.
* * * * *
"Speak on, O Bisrâm, bearer! Wherefore dost not obey? Speak on about Mai Kâli and the Noose--the Noose that is so soft, that never slips. Wherefore dost not speak, son of an owl?"
The voice was childish, fretful. So was the listless little figure in a flannel dressing-gown, which lay half upon the reed mat spread on the verandah floor, half against the red and yellow livery coat of Bisrâm, bearer. The latter remained silent, his dark eyes fixed deprecatingly on a taller figure within earshot. It was the child's mother, standing for a glance at her darling.
"Speak! Why dost not speak, base-born child of pigs? Lo! I will smite thee. Speak of Mai Kâli and the Noose. Lo! Bisrâm, bearer, be not unkind. Remember I am sick. Show me the Noose. Ai! Bisra! show it to Sonny Baba."
The liquid Urdu fell from the child's lips with quaint precision, and ended in the coaxing wail of one who knows his power.
That was unmistakable. The man's high-bred, sensitive face, which had not quivered under the parentage assigned to him by the thin, domineering voice, melted at the appeal, and the red and yellow arms seemed to close round their charge at the very suggestion of sickness. Bisrâm gave another deprecating glance at the tall white figure at the door, and then, from the folds of his waistcloth, took out a silk handkerchief crumpled into a ball. But a dexterous flutter left it in uncreased folds across the child's knees.
"Lo! Protector of the Poor! such is the Noose of Kâli," said Bisrâm, deferentially.
Seen thus, the handkerchief looked larger than one would have expected: or perhaps it is more correct to say longer, for, the texture being loose like canvas, even the slight drag across the child's knees stretched the stuff lengthwise. It was of that curious Indian colour called oodah, which is not purple or crimson, but which looks as if it had been the latter and might become the former--the colour, briefly, of recently spilt blood. It looked well, however, in the soft lustrous folds lying upon the child's white dressing-gown. He smiled down at it joyfully: yet not content, since there was more to come.
"Twist it for Mai Kâli. Twist it, Bisrâm, bearer! Ai! base-born, twist it or I will smite--"
"It is time for the Shelter of the World to take his medicine," began Bisrâm, interrupting the imperious little voice. "Lo! does his Honour not see the mem waiting for him?"
Sonny gave a quick glance at his mother. He knew his power there also. "I'se not goin' to take it, mum," he called decisively, "till he's twisted a' Noose. I won't--I want a' stwangle somefin' first. Tell him, mum--please. Then I'll 'waller it like a good boy."
"Do what he wants, Bisrâm, and then bring him here," said Sonny's mother, her eyes soft. For the child had but lately chosen the path of Life instead of the Valley of the Shadow, so even wayward footsteps along it were welcome.
"Now is it Government orders," boasted Sonny, reverting to the precisions and peremptoriness of Hindustani with a wave of his small hand. "So twist and strangle, and if thou dost it not, my father will cause hanging to come to thee."
"Huzoor!" assented Bisrâm, cheerfully, as he shifted his burden slightly so as to free his left hand. The next instant a purple crimson rope of a thing, circled on itself, settled down upon the neck of a big painted mud tiger, bright yellow with black stripes and fiery red eyes, which one of the native visitors had brought that morning for the magistrate's little son.
"Now the Protector of the Poor can pull," said Bisrâm, bearer. "It will not slip."
But Sonny's wan little face had perplexity and doubt in it. "But, Bisra, Mai Kâli rides a tiger. She wouldn't stwangle it. Would she, mum? I wouldn't stwangle my pony. I'd wather stwangle the gwoom; wouldn't you, mum? I would. I'd wather like to stwangle Gâmoo."
"My dear Sonny!" exclaimed his mother, looking with amused horror at the still, helpless little figure which Bisrâm had brought to her. "You wouldn't murder poor Gâmoo, surely!"
Sonny made faces over his quinine, as if that were a matter of much more importance.
"'Ess, I would," he said, with his mouth full of sweet biscuits. "I'd stwangle him, and then Mai Kâli would be pleased for a fousand years; and then I'd stwangle Ditto an' Peroo too; so she'd be pleased for a fousand fousand years--wouldn't she, Bisra?"
"Huzoor!" assented Bisrâm, bearer.
"My dear," said Sonny's mother, going back with a somewhat disturbed look to the room where the magistrate, Sonny's father, was busy over crabbed Sanskrit texts and bright-coloured talc pictures; for in his leisure hours he was compiling a Hindu Pantheon for the use of students, "I almost wish Bisrâm would not tell Sonny so many stories about the gods and goddesses. They do such horrid things."
The scholar, who in his heart nourished a hope that his son might in due time follow in his footsteps, and, perhaps, gain reputation where his father only found amusement, looked up from his books mildly.
"Gods and goddesses always do, my dear. Their morality seldom conforms to that which obtains among their worshippers. I intend to draw general attention to this anomaly. Besides, Sonny will have to learn these things anyhow when he begins Greek and Latin; he will in fact find this previous knowledge of great use. Kâli, for instance, is the terrific form of Durga who, of course, corresponds to the Juno of the Greeks and Romans and the Isis of Egypt. She is also the crescent-crowned Diana, and as Parbutt the Earth-mother Ceres. Under the name of Atma, again, she is 'goddess of souls governing the three worlds,' and so equivalent to Hecate Triformis--"
"Yes! my dear," interrupted his wife, meekly. "But for all that I don't want Sonny to talk of strangling the grooms; it really doesn't sound nice. However, as Bisrâm is eager, now Sonny is really recovering, to get away at once for his usual leave, I won't say anything to the child. He will forget while Bisrâm is away, and I will give orders that the latter is not to mention the subject on his return."
Bisrâm himself, receiving his pay and his orders ere starting on the yearly visit to his own country, which was the only portion of his life by day or night not absolutely--without any reservation whatever--at the disposal of his employers, fully acquiesced in the mem-sahiba's dictum. The Noose of Kâli was scarcely a nice game for the little master; indeed his slave would never have introduced it under ordinary circumstances. But the mem must remember that dreadful day when the Heart's-eye lay so still, caring for nothing, and the doctor-sahib had said there was nothing to be done save to coax him into looking into the restless Face of Life instead of into the restful Face of Death. That was when he, Bisrâm, who knew, had spoken of the Noose; and, at least, it had done the little Shelter of the World no harm.
"Harm?" echoed Sonny's mother, gently. "You have never done him harm, Bisra. Why, the doctor-sahib himself said your hand was fortunate with the child. If you had not been with him, I think--I think, Bisrâm--he might have died. And now I am even wondering if I am wise to let you go--"
Bisrâm looked up eagerly. "I must go, Huzoor--I must go without fail to-night--the year is over--" He paused abruptly, then added quietly: "The Huzoor need have no fear. The little master will do well. The Mighty One who cares for children will protect this one."
He spoke with such faith in voice and face, that Sonny's mother going back once more to the study, and finding her husband busy as usual over his Pantheon, lingered to look doubtfully at the talc pictures, and finally remark that after all the people really had a good deal of religious feeling, and actually seemed to believe in a God. Bisrâm, for instance, had said that Sonny was in the guardianship of One who suffered the little children-- Here her eyes filled with tears, and her voice sank.
"He meant Mâta Devi, I expect, my dear," replied the scholar without looking up. "She is another form of Kâli or Durga, and corresponds to Cybele or the Mater Montana--"
"He was very eager to get away, however," went on Sonny's mother, almost aggrievedly. "I really think he might have stayed a few days longer till the boy was quite himself. But devoted as he is, he is just like the rest of them--selfishly set on what they are accustomed to--"
"He put off going nearly a month though, and you know, my dear, that when he took service as Sonny's bearer, he stipulated for a fortnight's leave every spring, about a certain time, in order to perform some religious ceremonial," protested the justice.
"Well, and he has had it. Every year for five years; so he might have given it up for once. But he wouldn't. I don't believe he would, not even to save Sonny's life. However, I think the child is all right, and even if I had kept Bisrâm, he wouldn't have been much good, for he has been frightfully restless and hurried the last few days."
He did not seem so, however, as he stood quietly in the growing dusk at the gateless gate of the compound to look back at the house where he had left the little Shelter of the World asleep. His scarlet and yellow coat was gone, replaced by the faint coral-coloured garments of the pilgrim; he carried a network-covered pot for holy water, slung on his left wrist, and the yellow trident of Siva showed like a frown on his forehead. The thickets of flowering shrubs, the tangles of white petunias bordering the path, sent their perfume into the air; but above it rose the heavy, dead-sweet scent from a wild dhatura plant which, taking advantage of an unweeded nook by the gate, thrust its long white flowers across the pilaster; one of them indeed reaching past it, and so, seen five-pointed against the dusk beyond, looking like a slim white hand pointing the way thither.
Bisrâm stooped deliberately to pick it, tore it into its five segments, and placed the pieces in his bosom, muttering softly, "With heart and brain and feet, and hands and eyes, Devi, I am thy servant." Then for a second he raised himself to his full height, and stretched both his thin, fine hands--such delicately supple, strong hands--towards the house. "Sleep sound, Life of my Life," he murmured again. "Sleep sound, and have no fear. The offering will be complete, though the time is short indeed."
So, turning on his heel, he passed into the dusk, beyond the gate, whither the flower had pointed.
A fortnight later he came out of it once more, passed into his hut in the gloaming, dressed as a pilgrim, and emerged therefrom ten minutes afterwards in the red and yellow coat, with a huge white turban with a bend, as the heralds call it, across it bearing his master's crest. So altered, he slipped back into his place as if he had never left it, and setting aside the reed screen at the door of Sonny's nursery, stood within. Sonny, in his white flannel dressing-gown, was convalescent enough to be saying his prayers, kneeling on his mother's knee.
"Go on, dear," she said gently. "You can speak to Bisrâm afterwards."
Sonny, whose feet were less wayward, now shut his eyes again, and assumed a prayerful expression.
"--an' all kine friends, an' make me a velly good boy--yamen--O Bisra! where's the Noose?" The mother might smile, unable so far to pretend ignorance. Not so Bisrâm, bearer, who had his orders.
"What Noose, Shelter of the World?" he asked gravely. "Thy servant remembers none; but he hath brought the Protector of the Poor a toy."
It was only one of the many which you can buy in any Indian town for the fraction of a farthing, made of mud, straw, cane; a bit of tinsel perhaps, or tuft of cotton-wool, their sole value over and above the ingenuity and time spent in making them. But Sonny had never seen this kind before, and laughed as the snakes, made out of curled shavings, leapt and twisted. Leapt so like life that his mother drew back hastily, telling herself that the bearer had certainly a fine taste in horrors. And no doubt there would be some tale to match these. Sonny, however, seemed to know it vaguely, for a puzzled look replaced the laugh. "Yea! Bisra," he said in imperious argument, "Mai Kâli had snakes and skulls too; but I like the Noose best. Why didst not bring it back, son of an owl?"
The man never moved a muscle. "The little master mistakes," he replied calmly. "It was some others who tied the Noose. Not this dustlike one. He is but the Protector of the Poor's bearer, Bisrâm."
CHAPTER II
A year is an eternity to the memory of a child. Indeed before a twelfth of one was over Sonny had ceased from suddenly, irrelevantly asking, "O Bisra! where is the Noose? Why didst not bring it back, son of an owl?" The thought seemed to have passed from his life altogether. From Bisrâm also, as he tended the child night and day, day and night, unremittingly, contentedly.
So the spring of the year returned, and with it, by one of those mysterious coincidences beyond classification, came the old desire. It came suddenly--irrelevantly it seemed to Sonny's parents--during a brief attack of fever which the changing season brought to the boy. But Bisrâm, bearer, hearing the little fretful wail, "O Bisra, where is the Noose? I want the Noose," stood silent for a moment with a scared look in his eyes, then turned them in quick appeal to his mistress, as if to ask leave for something. But she was silent also, so the old formula came gently--
"What Noose, Shelter of the World?"
That evening, however, when Harry--as his mother vainly strove to call him, now that, as she used to tell the boy fondly, he was a man and had had his curls cut--had fallen into the heavy sleep which brings so little relief, the bearer came into the study and asked for his usual yearly leave. A week might do, but leave he must have at once. True, the year was not up, but the master would doubtless remember that his slave had deferred going at the proper season last time because of Harry-sahib's illness (Bisrâm, punctilious to the least order, never forgot the child's new dignity). He did not want to lose the right season again; and so, if he went now, at once, even for a week, he would be back in time even if Harry-sahib were to be ill as he was last year, which Heaven forbid!
He was quite calm, but there was an almost pathetic entreaty in his dark eyes, so soft, so dark, that looking into them, one seemed to see nothing save soft darkness.
"Go!" commented Sonny's mother, when, moved by a vague feeling that Bisrâm meant well, his master handed on his request to the real authority. "Certainly not. I wonder he has the face to ask for leave when Sonny--I mean Harry--is down with fever. Not that it is anything, the doctor says, but a passing attack. Still, I am not going to run any risks with a strange servant. Go, indeed! It shows what his pretended devotion is worth--"
"Surely, my dear, he is devoted--"
"Oh, very! in his way. But really you spoil Bisra, Edward. Just because he can tell you things about those horrid gods and goddesses. Do you know, I really think of getting an English nurse for the child until I have--until I have to take him home," interrupted his wife, her initial sharpness of tone softening over the inevitable certainty of separation which clouds Indian motherhood. "It cannot be right to let him live in such an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance."
The magistrate, who was leaving the room, had paused at her remark about the nurse as he might have paused before a painful scene. "By Jove!" he murmured as if to himself, "I believe it would break the man's heart. I often wonder what on earth he'll do when the child has--to go home."
The inevitable lent a tremor to the father's voice also. But Bisrâm, despite the former's belief, spoke of the same separation quite calmly when, the very next morning the doctor coming early, found his little patient in the verandah getting the advantage of the fresh, bright air in Bisra's arms.
"When," asked the latter, calmly, but with that slow pathetic anxiety in his eyes, "was Harry-sahib going across the black water?"
"You think he ought to go?" said the doctor. "Why?"
"This slave does not think; he knows! The little master must go--go at once," replied the man, still calmly, though he held the child to him with a visibly closer strain. "The Huzoor himself knows how bad Hindustan is for the little ones. He must go, Huzoor, before he gets worse."
"But he is not going to get worse," said the doctor, kindly. "He is better already, and if he has another bout of fever his mother has promised to take him to the hills, so don't distress yourself."
Bisrâm's dark eyes looked wistfully into the doctor's.
"The hills? That would be worse. That would be nearer the evil. He must go far from Hindustan at once, Huzoor; and if you tell the mem this she will go--she will not mind."
"And you, Bisra?" asked the doctor, curiously.
The man's eyes flinched, but he never stirred a muscle under the blow.
"I am only the little master's bearer, Huzoor. He will not need one much longer: he grows big."
"It is only because he is in a hurry to get away himself, I verily believe," said Sonny's mother, when the doctor, also vaguely impressed with something in the man's appeal, told her of it. "You can't fathom these people. Oh! I know he wouldn't abate one atom of his care, and it is simply wonderful. All the same, I believe that just now he would be glad to be rid of the necessity for it, since it clashes with some of his religious notions. That's it, depend upon it. And I mean to let him go as soon as Sonny--I mean Harry--is better; and he really is better to-day, isn't he?"
"Much better. And you may be right; only it's always impossible to lay down the law for men like Bisra. Those high-caste hill Brahmins are a law unto themselves. However, I expect to find the boy quite cool to-morrow." He was not, however, and more than once, as he lay in Bisra's arms, the little fretful wail rose between sleeping and waking. "Where's the Noose, Bisra? I want the Noose." And Bisra would pause as if waiting for a promise of wayward life in threat or abuse, and when neither came would turn a wistful appeal to authority, and when it was silent say--
"What Noose, Shelter of the World?"
But in the dead of night a day or two later, when even maternal authority slept for a brief spell, Bisra's answer to the request, which came almost incoherently from the child's dry lips, was different.
Then he stood bent over the boy's cot in the attitude of a suppliant, and his joined petitioning hands trembled.
"Why dost ask it, Kâli ma?" he whispered rapidly. "Lo! have I not served thee? Would I not serve thee now if I could? But I have promised this, and they will not let me go for the other. Lo! Kâli ma! be merciful and ask no more, and when the child has gone away, I will serve thee all the years--yea! every day of all the years."
There was no passion, no excitement in his face or voice; only that pathetic appeal which passed into a murmured lullaby as the restless little sleeper turned on his pillow with a sigh of greater content.
"Better again this morning," was the doctor's verdict, with the rider that Bisrâm himself stood in need of a little rest. The man smiled faintly when his mistress replied that it would be her turn that night; though, to say sooth, Harry certainly did seem to improve when she slept.
"Perhaps Bisrâm works charms," remarked the doctor, thoughtlessly; whereat she frowned.
Charms or no charms, the boy was certainly worse next morning, and that despite the fact that Bisrâm, who had steadily refused to go further than the verandah, had spent the night huddled up outside the threshold, within which his mistress refused to allow him to come. He needed rest, she said, and though she could not compel him to take it, he should at least not work.
"You had better let him have his own way to-night," said the doctor at his evening visit. "The child gets on better, and you are fresher for the day's nursing. Those thin, delicate-looking natives are very wiry, and if the man won't rest, he won't, and that's an end of it."
He spoke cheerfully; but as he was getting into his dogcart he saw Bisrâm at his elbow. "The doctor-sahib thinks the little master very ill to-night?" he asked quietly.
"So ill that you must do your very best for him to-night. If any one can pull him through, you can, remember that."
"Huzoor!" said Bisrâm, submissively.
It was a very dark night; so dark that the rushlight in Sonny's room seemed almost brilliant from the verandah. Looking thence you could see the child's cot, one of its side rails removed, and in its place, as it were, the protection of Bisrâm's crouching figure. He did not touch the cot; he crouched beside it with clasped hands hanging over his knees, and dark eyes staring hard into the darkness as if waiting and listening.
So he sate, his clasped hands loosening, his eyes growing softer as the hours passed, bringing nothing but half-conscious sleep, half-conscious wakening to the child. Until suddenly, irrelevantly, just on the border-land of night and day, the fretful wail rose upon the silence loudly, insistently--
"Where is the Noose, Bisra? I want it. O Bisrâm, bearer, bring the Noose, and strangle something."
The slackness, the dreaminess left the man's hands and eyes. He stood up blindly, desperately to face these last words; the words for which he had been listening. Yet there was still the same pathetic self-control as he stretched his hands out over the sleeping child.
"Lo! Kâli ma," he muttered, "have I not served thee as ever, despite the child. Have I set him before thee? Nay! thou knowest I have risked life itself to have thy tale of offering complete when I was hindered. Thou didst not suffer. Wilt not wait for once? Wilt not wait one little while?"
His voice, sinking in its entreaty, ended in silence. But only for a second. Then the fretful wail began again.
"The Noose, Bisra! Be not unkind. Remember I am ill. O Bisra! I want you to strangle something for me--"
Bisra gave a faint sob; then joined his outstretched hands.
"Huzoor! so be it! the Noose shall find a victim. Yea, Shelter of the World, Bisra will strangle something. Sleep in peace!"
There was no sound in the room after that save the little contented sigh in which restlessness finds rest.
Outside, the shiver of the cicalas seemed to count the seconds, but inside the hours seemed to pass unnoticed as Bisra sate beside the cot, his hands listless, his eyes dreamy. There was nothing to wait for now, nothing to fear. That which had to come had come.
So with the first glint of light, a stealthy step glided in, and an anxious voice whispered--
"How is it with the child, Bisra?"
"It is well!" he whispered back, rising rather stiffly. "He hath slept since the darkest hour. He will sleep on."
The mother, peering carefully for a glimpse of the child's face, smiled at what she saw.
"He sleeps, indeed. Thou hast done well, Bisra!"
He made no answer. But ere he left the room, his night-watch being over, he paused to touch the foot-rail of the cot with both hands and so salaam, as those do who leave the presence.
Sonny was still sleeping when his father, entering his study with a lighter heart, found a stranger, as he thought, awaiting him there. It was a man, naked save for a waistcloth, lean, sinewy, lithe; the head was clean-shaven, save for the Brahminical tuft, and the face was disfigured by the weird caste marks of extreme fanaticism.
"Who--?" he began, shrinking involuntarily from one who might well be dangerous.
"It is Bisra, Huzoor" said a familiar voice, gently. "Bisra, the child-bearer. Bisra, the servant of Kâli also. Lo! here is Her Noose." As he spoke he held out the crimson-scarlet handkerchief twisted to a rope, and coiled in his curved palms like a snake. "The master, being learned, will know the Noose and its meaning. It hath brought Her many a blood-offering, Huzoor. Many and many every year without fail. And it will not fail this year either. It will bring Her the blood of Her servant, the blood of Bisrâm the Strangler."
"Bisrâm the Strangler!" echoed the magistrate, stupidly, as the even, monotonous voice ceased. Then he sate down helplessly in his chair. In truth he knew too much of the mystery of India to be quite incredulous.
Yet two hours after, when with the help of the police-officer he had been cross-questioning Bisra upon his confession, he told himself as helplessly that it was incredible--the man must be mad. He had been born to strangle, he said, and had strangled to keep Kâli ma content. That was necessary when you were born Her servant, especially when you had children. Perhaps he had let the little Shelter of the World creep too close to his heart, though he had striven to be just. At any rate Kâli ma had become jealous. He had not known this, at first, or he would never have given the mistress that promise about the Noose, for if it had been in Harry-sahib's hands Devi would never have sought his life. She always protected those with the Noose--they never came to harm--unless-- He had paused there, and then asked quickly if he had not said enough? Did they want him to tell any more! He could not give them the names of the victims, of course, not knowing them; but they were many--very many.
"There is nothing against him but his own story," said the magistrate, fighting against his growing conviction that the man spoke truth. "I can't commit him to the sessions on that."
"There is something more, I think," replied the police-officer, reluctantly. "Don't you remember that man who was found dead in a railway carriage about this time last year? He had an up-country ticket on him, and as this was out of the beat of Stranglers, no inquiry was made here. It was just about this time, and--and Bisrâm says he was in a hurry because the year was nearly up. He had been nursing the boy."
The boy's father, leaning with his head on his hand, groaned.
But Bisra was quite cheerful. He looked a little anxious, however, when two days after he was brought up formally to be committed for trial. There was still nothing definite against him save his own confession and the coincidence of the strangled man in the railway carriage. But opinion was dead against him amongst his countrymen. Of course he was one of Kâli's Stranglers. Did he not look one? Was he not born one? So how could he help being one? The argument brought no consolation to Sonny's father. But Bisrâm again was cheerful. He stood patiently between two yellow-legged policemen and told his tale at length, as if anxious to incriminate himself as much as possible, anxious that there should be no mistake. And when all the mysterious intricacies of charges and papers were over, and the two policemen nudged him to make place for other criminals, with a friendly "Come along, brother," he paused a moment with handcuffed, petitioning hands to ask how soon he was to be hanged.
The magistrate, leaning his head on his hand, made no answer. He knew what the question meant, and could not. The thought of his little son came between him and the truth; namely, that Bisra's sacrifice must wait the law's pleasure.
The doctor, too, in charge of the gaol where Bisra awaited trial, had not the heart to tell the truth. Every day when on his rounds he looked into the cell, like a wild beast's cage, where Bisra, being a Strangler, and therefore dangerous to life, was confined alone, he answered the question which the tall, naked figure stood up at his entrance to ask in the same words. Harry-sahib was better, and as for the hanging, that would come soon enough, never fear. Yet every day the pathetic, self-controlled eagerness on the man's face struck him with a sense of physical pain, and left him helpless before his own pity.
Until a day came--after not many days--when with a face sad from the sight of bitter grief that he could understand, the sense of his absolute helplessness before the mystery of this man's nature made the doctor feel inclined to throw pity to the winds and fall back on sheer common sense. After all the man was a murderer; and if he had been fond of the child--what then? Such criminals were often men of strong affections.
Yet once again, the sight of the submissive, salaaming figure, the sound of the wistful yet calm voice made him answer as usual. The child was better. The hanging would doubtless come ere long.
For once, however, Bisrâm did not accept the reply as final.
"The Huzoor means that it will not come today?" he asked quietly.
The doctor raised his eyebrows. "To-day? What made you think of to-day? Certainly not. There's no chance of it."
But he was wrong. Two hours afterwards the gaol overseer sent for him in a hurry, because Bisrâm had completed his sacrifice by strangling himself in his cell with his waistcloth. What else could he do, seeing that it was the last day of the year during which the propitiation of a sacrifice kept Kâli ma from revenge?
"Poor devil!" said the doctor, as he stood up after his useless examination. "I'm glad now I didn't tell him the child was dead."
[THE HALL OF AUDIENCE]
"This, gentlemen and respected sirs," said the blatant specimen of new India whom my friend Robbins had insisted on having as a guide to a ruined Rajput town, "is Hall of Common Audience, in more colloquial phrase, Court of Justice, built two, ought, six before Christ B.C. by Great Asoka, mighty monarch of then united Hindustan, full of Manu wisdoms, and sacred Veda occultations--"
Then I gave in. "For God's sake, Robbins," I said, "take away that fool or I shall kill him. A man who be-plasters even the Deity with university degrees is intolerable here."
Robbins gave me that look of condoling forbearance which had nearly driven me mad for a week and beguiled the babee away promptly, as if I had been a fractious child. I was, however, only a jilted man. A badly jilted man, whose jilting was of the kind which becomes almost comic from sheer excess of tragedy. To be brief, I had gone down on ten days' leave to Bombay to meet and marry the girl to whom I had been engaged for two years. Robbins, who was coming out in the same ship with her, was to have been best man. We had certainly been in love with each other when we last met; at least, if I was not, I have never been in love at all. If she was not, then I have never seen a girl in love. I wish to be absolutely fair in the matter, so I will confess that, as I went to meet her, I knew myself to be less emotional than I had been two years before. I had even vague qualms as to whether this sort of thing was quite wise. I was, to put it curtly, in the mental condition in which every man about to marry a fiancée whom he has not seen for two years must be. Presumably her mental condition was similar. But whereas I had to spend the three weeks preceding the irrevocable step in a jungle station where any novelty must necessarily be attractive, she spent it in an environment which gave her endless opportunities of seeing other men, and comparing them with me, and her ideal. The result being that she found she was in love with some one else. Being frank and honourable she told me the truth, with a kind of blank dismay. She did not offer to fulfil her engagement. How could she? when from the beginning to the end, from her first confession that I was her ideal, to her last letter, then in my breast pocket, the whole fabric of our future lives had been built by us on our belief in the permanence of this selfsame love of ours. We could only look in each other's eyes and wonder what was the matter with the foundations of our round world.
Robbins said I behaved splendidly. In truth I was too much stunned at first to realise what it actually meant, and then a certain contempt for them both, especially for the man who came and offered me a shot at him, made me magnanimous. I merely offered in my turn to be best man at the wedding, and was only deterred from doing so by the feeling that it was theatrical, and by Robbins suggesting that I had better have some ice on the back of my head. He meant well, did Robbins, and insisted on accompanying me on what was to have been my wedding tour; for I had my ten days' leave, and I was in no hurry to go back to the gossiping little station where the bungalow I had furnished for her lay waiting a mistress.
Yes! Robbins meant well, and by sheer counter-irritation kept me going. There was a honeymoon off the same ship which came up country with us stage by stage, and the efforts Robbins made to prevent me from seeing its bliss were pathetically comic. The bride and bridegroom wore neat, new, brown-leather shoes, and she had a new brown-leather handbag, just like one which I had carried for my fiancée before she explained the situation. As I sate opposite them I wondered savagely if my face had worn the idiotic smirk of sheer content visible on the man's, and I tucked my own new brown shoes under the seat. They looked so forlorn beside Robbins' big boots. For all that, I combated all condemnation of the delinquents for the first three days. The only honourable theory of marriage being that based upon a mutual and romantic love, it would be unjust because of a single mistake, to blame any one for acting in accordance with a belief which had made Englishmen and Englishwomen what, thank God, they were. In fact I was badly, brutally moral, until, coming out into the hotel verandah during one of our rests by the way, I happened on the bride and bridegroom looking at the moon.
Then the primeval desire to murder rose up, seized me, and held me. Why hadn't I taken the scoundrel's offer and killed him? I was a good shot; and Robbins, as an army doctor, an excellent second. Then I could have married the bride-widow, or spurned her, as I preferred.
There was really, I told myself, no logical foothold between this and being best man. If marriage was an affair of love, these two were right, and the part designed for me by Providence obviously that of second fiddle. If not, they were wrong, and I had a right to claim redress. To shilly-shally, feeling at once hurt and magnanimous, was absurd. I had lain awake, afterwards, debating half in jest, half in earnest, whether I should send Robbins back to the wedding with my cartel, or go myself with a set of silver salt-cellars in a velvet case. But underneath my jest and earnest lay a keen yet vague desire to understand, to find some solid spot on which to rest. I had still been debating the question, when, to please Robbins, who liked me to have no time for thought, we had driven out next morning to these ruins. The country through which we drove had been the ordinary Rajputana country; flat--or nearly so--dry, rocky. Then we had come to a spiky, spiny, roach-back hillock, over which the dead town sprawled, half buried in its own dust, half lost in the sunshine.
I had been watching Robbins' big boots all the way, so I was in a bad temper. Apart from other causes, however, I had some excuse for threatening to kill the guide. For the Hall of Audience to which we had just climbed was, briefly, one of those places which make some of us nineteenth-century folk remember the warning given long ago to an eager reformer to take the shoes from off his feet, since the ground whereon he stood had already been made holy by other hands than his. Yet it was plain almost to bareness. Devoid utterly of any of that ornamentation telling of human hopes and fears, likings, dislikings, and ideals, which men all over the world strive wistfully, hopelessly, to make permanent by carving them in stone. But it was a miracle of light and shade, with its triple ranks of square stone columns--rose-coloured in the sunshine about their feet, blood red in the gloom of arches about their heads--standing like sentinels round a Holy of Holies which was roofed only by the open sky, and floored level to the marble pavement surrounding the still pool, with clear, cool water. And through the outer arches, on all sides, showed that indefinite glare, and dust, and haze, faintly yellow, faintly purple--that burden and heat of the Eastern day in which millions are born, and toil, and die--which seems to swallow up the real India and hide so much of it from Western eyes.
I had just got so far in my appreciation of the indefinable charm of the place, when Robbins returned to stand beside me and look down on the brimming water.
"Curious!" he said, "at the top of a hill like this. I wonder what's the reason of it?"
"Those of uncultivated mind, sirs," replied New India, promptly, "hold it by reason of Grace-of-God. We who through merciful master's aid have acquired hydraulics prefer system of secret syphons; though the latter belief is optional."
"If that man remains here," I remarked aside to Robbins, "I refuse to be held responsible for my actions. Take him away and see the rest of the ruins. I am going to stop here--this is enough for me."
They went off together, the guide babbling of modern equity. The last words I heard were a quotation: "Boots not to say, O Justice! what asperities have not been committed in Thy name!"
Perhaps. No doubt dreadful things had been done even in this Hall of Audience, though it lay very still now; very silent in the sunshine.
I sate down on the base of a sentinel column and looked at the sky, mirrored at my feet, wondering what other things the water had seen.
So by degrees the question seemed to clamour at me. What had been done there? What was it? What gave the place its charm for me? For it had a charm, an infinite charm.
I gave an impatient shrug of my shoulders at the sound of footsteps. Robbins need not surely watch me as if he feared I might commit suicide; though the water certainly looked inviting. But it was not Robbins. It was an old man with a shaven head, and a very clean saffron-coloured cloth, coming through the pillared ranks with a brass poojah basket like a big cruet-stand in his hand. My mind misgave me instantly. He was far too clean for a real ascetic, and there was a bogus air about him as of one expecting tourists and their alms. In addition he came straight towards me, and squatting down by the edge, within reach absolutely of my contaminating shadow, began to mutter prayers.
I rose disgusted; but my first movement showed me I was at any rate partly mistaken, for he turned his head, startled at the sound. Then I saw he could not have known I was there, for he was blind. I saw also that the basket which he had set down contained nothing but the star-like flowers of the wild jasmine.
"Whom are you going to worship?" I asked instantly, for I was a connoisseur in ceremonies, having spent years of study over the ancient cults of India.
He stood up instantly and salaamed, recognising the accent of the master. "No one, Huzoor," he replied. "I am only going to make Mother Âtma her crown."
"Âtma!" I echoed. "Who was she?"
A half-puzzled, half-cunning look came to his face. "It is a long story, Huzoor; but if the Cherisher of the Poor will give his slave a rupee--"
Returning to my first impression of him, I was about to move away, when he added plaintively: "I tell it better than the baboo, Huzoor, but now-a-days he comes with the sahibs. So my stomach is often empty. May God silence his tongue!"
The desire pleased me. It matched my own. And as I paused, I noticed that the old man, who had squatted down again, had begun to thread the jasmine flowers on some link which was invisible from where I stood.
"What are you using to thread the flowers?" I asked curiously.
"A woman's hair, Huzoor. It is always the hair of a woman who has died, but whose child has lived, that is used for Mai Âtma's crown. Shall I tell the story, Huzoor?"
"Was she beautiful?" I asked irrelevantly, why I know not.
"I do not know, Huzoor," he replied. "Am I not blind?"
The answer struck me as irrelevant also, but I went on idly, feeling, in truth, but small interest in what I was convinced must be some hackneyed tale I had heard a hundred times before, since I was given to the hearing of tales.
"Is it about this place?" I asked.
He shook his head again. "I do not know, Huzoor. It is about Mai Âtma. Shall I tell the story?"
"You seem to know very little about the story, I must say. How do you know it is about Âtma?"
He smiled broadly. "It is about Mai Âtma, sure enough. The Huzoor will see that if he lets me tell the tale."
I clinked a rupee down among the jasmine flowers and bid him fire away, and be quick about it.
He began instantly, plunging without any preface into a curiously rhythmed chant, the very first line of which gave pathetic answer to my irrelevant question, and at the same time showed the cause of the old man's ignorance. It ran thus:--
"O world which she has left, forget not she was fair."
Vain appeal when made in the oldest known form of Arya-Pali--the dialect in which the edicts of Asoka are carved--and of which not one man in ten million, even in India, knows the very existence. I happened to be one of the few, and though at the time I could naturally only gather the general outline of the chant, I subsequently took it down word for word from the old man's lips. Some passages still remain obscure; there are yawning gaps in the narrative, but taking it all in all, it is a singularly clear bit of tradition, preserved, as it were, by the complete ignorance of those who passed the words from lip to lip. Roughly translated, it runs thus:--
"O world she left, forget not she was fair; so very fair. Her small kind face so kind. Straight to the eyes it looked, then smiled or frowned. About her slender throat were gold-blue stones. Gold at her wrists; the gold hem of her gown slid like a snake along the marble floor, coiled like a snake upon the water's edge.
"By night she asked the stars, by day the sun, what they would have her do.
"I was her servant sitting at her door,
Watching her small feet kiss the marble floor;
Reading the water mirror's heaven-learnt lore.
"O world she left, remember she was Queen!
"For Âtma ruled a queen ere she was born, her widowed mother wasting nine long months to give her life ere following the King.
"O Âtma mâta! strike thy servant blind,
He and his sons for ever, lest they find
Thy face within the crown their fingers bind.
"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall, 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine?' (There was a dainty jewel at her breast, kept time in sparkles to her lightest word.)
"'Who hath a claim'--her small, kind face so wise!
"O Âtma mâta! strike thy servant blind,
He and his sons for ever!"
* * * * *
"See! how her soft feet kiss the marble floor! Âtma, the girl-queen, dancing to herself, close to the pool; the jasmine in her hair falling to fit the rhythm of her feet, and scent their warm life with the scent of death, or sail away upon the water's breast like mirrored stars. Oh, bind from them a crown; a crown for Âtma mâta, who is kind--for Âtma, who hath struck her servant blind."
* * * * *
"Hark! how her voice comes whispering in my ear: 'I see naught but my own face in the deep. No other face but this--my face alone. And there are always stars about my head, or else the sun. Read me the riddle quick.' (There was a tremor in her perfumed hair which matched the tremor of her perfumed breath.) 'Âtma is queen,' I said; 'the stars, the sun, weave crowns as I do. Wear them. Oh! my queen.'
"O Âtma mâta! rightly am I blind,
Blind was I then in heart and soul and mind.
"Hark! how her voice comes echoing through the Hall. (The cold blue stones about her slender waist clipped all her purple robe to long straight folds.) 'Go tell your masters, Âtma needs no King. She is the Queen, her son shall be the King, and not the son to Kings of other lands. So if they seek for beauty, seek not mine--it is not mine to give--it is my son's! My son the gods will send me ere I die.'
"O Âtma mâta! strike thy servant blind,
He and his sons for ever, lest they find
Thy face within the crown their fingers bind.
"See! how her slim hand grasps the marble throne. See! how her firm feet grip the marble step! Hark how her voice rings clear with angry scorn. (There was a loose gold circlet on her wrist, slid to soft resting as she raised her arm.) 'Oh! shame to brawl like dogs about a bone! Cowards to kill because a woman's fair. Can they not take the promise of a Queen? Go! bid your masters bind fair sons in peace. Âtma will choose a father for her King--she needs no lover.'
"O Âtma mâta! strike thy servant dead.
"'Hush!'--just a whisper on the water's edge, a faint glow from the sacred censer's fire. 'What dost thou see, my friend, down in the deep? There in the circle of the sacred flowers?' (The incense cloud rose white upon the dark, and hid us from each other, hid all things save water and our hands--her hands in mine clasped in the cold clear pool.) 'Naught, oh my Queen! Naught but thy face--thy face--beside mine own.' (Cold was the water, cold her little hand, cold was her voice.) 'Nay! more than that,' she said, 'thou dost forget the stars about my head.'
"O Âtma mâta! strike thy servant blind,
For being blind in heart and soul and mind.
"Hark! how her voice goes echoing through the Hall. 'Go, bid your masters sheathe their swords at once, nor spill men's blood because a woman's fair. For I have chosen. I will wed with none, but since God sends the children to the world and asks no questions how they come or why, I will take him as father to my King. The law allows adoption; be it so. From out God's children I have bought a son to be your King and mine. Lo! here he stands.' (Her arm about the sturdy, dimpled limbs drew the child closer to the cold blue stones clipping her purple robe to long, straight folds.) 'Some woman bore him--fair and strong and bold--bore him by God's decree to be a son. That is enough for me who am your Queen. Go, tell the brawlers, Âtma hath her King.' (So stooping, whispered softly to the boy, who straightway lisped to order parrot-wise.) 'Who hath a claim to-day 'gainst me or mine? Who hath a claim?' And as of old came answer: 'None, O King.'
"None said they all, and so I held my tongue.
O Âtma mâta! shall I ever find
Thy kind, wise face? Oh! wherefore am I blind?
* * * * *
"Hark! how her voice breaks in upon the child's. A claim at last.
"So they--these kings--have dared
To kill my people--nay! not mine--my son's!
Have they no shame--no pity for the poor?
"The gold hem round her robe's straight virgin folds coiled like a snake asleep upon the floor, the sparkling jewel fastened on her breast shone bright and steady as a distant star.
"There was no tremor in her perfumed hair, there was no quiver in her perfumed breath; the cold blue stones about her throat and waist, the loose gold circlet on her slender wrist, the jasmine-blossom chaplet in her hair, looked as though carved in stone, so still she stood before the dead man on the marble floor.
"His red blood crept in curves to find her feet and clasp them in a claim for vengeance due, while those around cried 'Justice from the King!'
"Until she smiled--her small, kind face so wise, and her clear voice came echoing through the Hall. 'Vengeance is mine,' she said, 'and not the King's. Send forth no army, spill no blood for me. Search not the water-mirror for a sign. I know the answer of the sun and stars. So send our heralds out, and bid these Kings come as Kings should, and not as murderers to plead their cause before the King, my son. Come with all state as to a wedding feast, come with all hope as bridegrooms to the bride. My son shall choose my lover, so prepare all things in order--music, feasting, flowers.' (Then turned to where I stood, and said aside: 'Forget not thou to make a jasmine crown.')
"O Âtma mâta! wherefore was I blind?
Did I not know how wise thou wert, how kind,
How cold thy hand, how warm the heart behind?
"Fair, strong, and bold he stood, the little King; the noonday sun above the child's bare head scarce cast a shadow on his small, bare feet, standing so straight beside the water's edge, where, half afloat upon the clear, still depths, a small round raft of jasmine-blossoms lay ready to give the omen.
"Heaped so high, so piled with little scented stars, that I--her servant with the crown she had bespoke--stood wondering what need there was of all. And round about the mirror-pool in rank sat Âtma's lovers waiting the decree.
"Till suddenly the baby raised his hand. (There was a loose gold circlet on his wrist, which smote him on the breast as it fell back, making him wince, so all too large it was.) But the child bit his lip and took no heed, knowing his kingly part right royally; so, parrot-wise, he lisped the ordered words: 'My mother Âtma hath no need for love; since she hath mine. She hath no need, my lords, for you as lovers, but she sends by me, as sister sends her brothers, that which sure should heal the strife and make you brothers too.'
"So at the last he stooped, and with a push sent the flower-raft afloat upon the pool, dipping and dancing on the waves it made, so that the loose, white blossoms of the pile floated to drift like stars upon the depths, leaving what lay beneath them clear and cold.
"O Âtma mâta! why was I not blind?
Thy face, thy face was there in flowers enshrined!
Thy cold dead face, with cold dead flowers entwined.
* * * * *
"O world she left! to bring it peace not war.
O world she left, forget not she was fair,
So very fair. The jasmine in her hair
And round her kind, wise face; about her throat
The cold blue stones, and for her queenly crown
The sunlight in the water--like the stars.
"O Âtma mâta! strike thy servant blind,
He and his sons for ever, lest they find
Thy face within the wreath their fingers bind."
* * * * *
The old man's song ceased, but he went on without a pause. "The Huzoor will hear that it is all about Âtma. Her name is there always."
He had finished stringing the flowers also, and now with a deft hand set the fragile garland--strung like a daisy chain upon a dead woman's hair and then tied to a circle--afloat upon the water, where it drifted idly, each separate flower separate, and keeping its appointed place.
A crown of scented stars!
I roused myself to answer. "Undoubtedly it is all about Âtma; but you have not told me why you weave the crown?"
"It is always woven, Huzoor," he replied. "Our family belongs to the place, and as one son is always blind, he stays at home--since he cannot earn money at other trades, Huzoor--and makes Mai Âtma's crown as his fathers did."
"One son is always blind?" I echoed curiously.
"Always, Huzoor. It is ever so. One is blind in each generation, so he makes Mai Âtma's crown."
He and his sons for ever! a strange coincidence truly.
"Then no one has ever seen her face 'within the wreath their fingers twine'?" I asked, quoting the words involuntarily and forgetting that he could not understand them. He answered the first part of the sentence.
"How could that be, Huzoor, seeing we are always blind?"
True. But if one was not blind? My thought was interrupted by Robbins' voice from behind.
"Hope you haven't found it long, old chap; but the baboo really knows a lot about Asoka. Fine old beggar he must have been. And then he has got a chant about some female called Âtma who had a lot of lovers, don't you know." Robbins pulled himself up hastily, and, to cover his confusion, protested that it was just the sort of unintelligible gibberish which interested me, and thereupon bade the baboo give me a specimen.
Before I could stop him, the brute had got well into the first line; but even in my wrath I was relieved to find that it was indeed absolutely unintelligible. New India evidently did not understand the old. I came to this conclusion before I got my fingers, as gently as I could, inside his rainbow-hued comforter and choked him off.
"I cannot help it, Robbins," I said as I tendered the baboo five rupees as hush-money. "If you knew all you would excuse me."
Robbins gave me one of his most sympathetic looks and said he quite understood.
Did he? Did I? I asked myself that question over and over again, until in the dead of the night I could ask it no longer. The desire for an answer grew too strong.
It was still night when I stood once more beside the water's edge. The moon had paled the red ranks of the sentinel pillars, the dust and heat and burden of the day was gone. All things were clear and flooded with cool, quiet, passionless light. And on the water lay the crown of starry flowers. It had drifted close to the edge, at the extreme end of the pool, beside a square projection in the marble floor, whence you could look clear into the depths. No doubt the place of divination. I went over to it moved by an irresistible impulse, and, kneeling down, thrust my hand into the cool water.
Was it fancy, or did I feel a cold, soft hand in mine? Was it a passing dizziness, or did a white, scented vapour close round me like a cloud, hiding all things save the water framed in that crown of jasmine?
Âtma! Mai Âtma!!
* * * * *
There was no need so far as I am concerned for the appeal--
"Forget not she was fair."
I have never forgotten it, though it is years since I saw, or fancied I saw, her face in the water.
But I have forgotten other things. Indeed, I forgot them so speedily that I saw poor old Robbins was quite puzzled and hurt in his feelings. So, before my wedding tour came to an end, I thought it kinder to give him something definite as an excuse for my cheerfulness. I told him, therefore, that I had fallen in love with some one else.
He gave a low whistle, said, "By Jove!" then added heartily, "Upon my soul, old chap, I believe it's the wisest thing you can do."
Perhaps it was. But I am not yet married. I am waiting for a woman who does not want a lover.
[IN A FOG]
A great flock of fleecy white clouds were browsing up the steep hillside like sheep, and hiding part of the great map of India which lay spread out five thousand feet below one of the isolated peaks which rise, in sheer masses of granite, from the dusty deserts of Rajputana.
Even to their dustiness, however, had come a faint tinting of green, since the seasonal rains had begun. For the moment, nevertheless, the incessant deluge had ceased, giving place to one of those brilliantly fine monsoon days--fine with the fineness of gentian skies, and snowdrift clouds, which remind Indian exiles of the cold, crisp North.
But already these same clouds were losing their lightness and beginning to sink earthwards; sure sign that the break in the rains was at an end. Still here, in the little station beside the lake, which looks as if the least tilt would make it brim over and send it rolling like quicksilver to the sun-dry plains below, the sky was all the clearer because of the steady increase of those fleecy flocks among the glens and ravines which spread outwards, downwards, ray-like, star-shaped, from the summit.
The increase was so steady that, after a time, the flocks coalesced, and the likeness passed into that of a rolling sea, through whose waves the knolls and peaks rose like islands; until the whole scene, lake and all, showed as a clustered coral reef shows in the Pacific Ocean--still, dream-like, peaceful utterly.
There was no peace, however, on the face of the Englishman in undress uniform who was sitting at an office table in the verandah of a thatched bungalow, which, fenced in perfunctorily from a sheer precipice on three sides by a frail trellis of bamboo solidified by morning glories, was perched above the now unseen levels below.
"If I could get reliable information," he muttered irritably, "I could be prepared. But I can hear nothing of the relief columns, and it is quite impossible for me to predicate the movements of the mutineers; yet without this it is difficult to know how to receive them."
His voice rose as he went on, for a yawn and a stir from a lounge-chair set in the shade, told him he had a listener.
"Not the laste bit in loife, me dear bhoy," came with the yawn. "Sure we've got to kill them somehow."
The first speaker looked up angrily from the map he was studying.
"Perhaps if I were only directly responsible for fifteen convalescents, as you are, Tiernay, I should be content to--to be in a fog. But I am the Brigade Major, and in the absence on duty of the commanding officer, and, I regret to say, all but a mere handful of native troops, I am responsible for the safety of a hundred and thirty-five helpless women and children--their lives and deaths--"
He was interrupted by the mixed sound of a laugh and the finishing of some brandy and water over which Dr. Tiernay had evidently been snoozing.
"Divvle a bit. Loife and death's my business from wan year's end to the other. There's responsibility for yez. And I kill as many as I cure, as all we pill-boxes do. Sure we haven't a fair chance, for a man keeps well without a doctor. It's when he thinks of dyin' he comes to us--an' nine toimes out of ten we can't help him. For talk of bein' in a fog! Be jabers! it's nothing to the British Pharmacopœia. When I write a prescription I always put D.V., weather permitting, at the tail of it."
The Brigade Major looked at the dishevelled, lazy figure, so different from his own, distastefully.
"Well, I prefer a clearer conception of my line of treatment. Now if this portion of the rebels, which, there seems little doubt, are making for us here"--his finger followed a red line he had marked, "elect to proceed--"
"Elect, is it?" interrupted the doctor. "Sure they won't elect to do anything. It will come to them widout their knowing how, like fayver or catarrh. An' it's no manner of use beginning to physic a patient till ye know what disease fancies him. So lave off wid worrying, me dear bhoy, and just get out the salts and senna--"
"Salts and senna!" echoed the Brigade Major, angrily. "Really, Tiernay, considering you are the only other man in the place--for I don't count your miserable convalescents, of course, and my handful of natives is more an anxiety than a help--I do think you might talk sense."
Dr. Tiernay rose, yawned, and walked over to the office table, a tall, lank figure with a reckless, whimsical face, alert now to the uttermost.
"An' isn't it sinse? Salts and senna is what's generally wanted to begin with. Well, I've collected every lethal weapon I can lay hands on, including the dintistry case and the horse-pistols with which me grand-uncle, Macturk of Turksville, shot his wife's brother; so me salts and senna's ready. And, by the Lord, I'll exhibit it too whin the patient comes along--trust Micky Tiernay for that. But till he does"--here his face took a sudden, almost serious gravity--"ah, just quit cultivating omniscience, and lave the fog alone. Sure only the divvle himself could say what the blackguards will do."
"But Hoshyari Mul, the banker, thinks--"